2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper outlines initial steps in the design, development, and validation of a human-centered engineering design (HCED) self-assessment survey. The survey consists of 17 items intended to measure students’ degree of confidence in HCED practices associated with the five conceptual spaces of the HCD framework: Understand, Synthesize, Ideate, Prototype, and Implement. The purpose of this instrument is to measure learning progression as a corollary of engagement with the various HCED learning experiences being deployed in diverse courses across the College of Engineering. The long-term goals of this work are to assess the impact of these various HCED learning experiences and to better understand how to facilitate the introduction of HCED into existing engineering curricula. This work will be relevant to readers interested in engineering education college-wide, working across multiple discipline-specific departments. We present the motivations for this work, including relevant education and learning science research supporting such endeavors. We explain the design and development of the instrument and its theoretical underpinnings. We explore the validity of the items using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha. An early deployment of this instrument reached students in six total courses at the 100-, 200-, and 300-levels. The responses from these groups are compared and discussed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these early findings as well as our intentions for future work. We believe that this tool will support engineering educators in assessing students’ confidence in HCED practices.
This paper outlines the first steps in the design, development, and validation of a human-centered engineering design (HCED) self-assessment survey. This survey consists of 17 items intended to measure students’ degree of confidence in HCED practices associated with the five conceptual spaces of the HCD framework: Understand, Synthesize, Ideate, Prototype, and Implement. The purpose of this instrument is to measure learning progression as a corollary of engagement with the various HCED learning experiences being deployed in diverse courses across the Engineering College. The long-term goal of this work is to assess the impact of these various HCED learning experiences, and to better understand how to facilitate the introduction of HCED into the existing Engineering curriculum. This work will be relevant to readers interested in engineering education college-wide, working across multiple discipline-specific departments. We present the motivations for this work, including relevant education and learning science research supporting such endeavors. We explain the design and development of the instrument and its theoretical underpinnings. We explore the validity of the items using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha. An early deployment of this instrument reached students in six courses at the 100-, 200-, and 300-levels. The responses from these groups are compared and discussed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these early findings as well as our intentions for future work. We believe that this tool will support engineering educators in assessing students’ confidence in HCED practices.