2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Human-centered design (HCD) is integral to engineering design. Different programs at the university level are trying to integrate HCD into their existing engineering design courses. In previous work, we developed a human-centered engineering design (HCED) framework that identifies connections between human-centered design processes and mindsets and literature-based engineering design activities. Given the affordances of the HCED framework, we argue that it can assist educators in planning and building curriculum maps that can be used to identify learning progressions for engineering students to develop human-centered engineering design knowledge, skills, and mindsets.

Furthermore, learning progressions are important for assessing students’ achievements in an educational program. These are strategic tracks that outline students’ journeys through an entire program in the context of developing a specified competency or knowledge base. These are often informed by program educational objectives. Literature has defined the value of learning progressions in K–12 science and math education as well as how to design them in these contexts. However, these progressions are not well explored at the college level. Specifically, learning progressions that explicitly focus on HCED in four-year engineering programs have yet to be explored and need to first be developed theoretically, then validated using empirical evidence.

In our ongoing collaboration with an accredited, four-year aerospace engineering program, we are piloting the development of program-level learning progressions that connect directly to program educational objectives and ABET student learning outcomes. These build on previous work that piloted our HCED framework at the course level. In this work-in-progress paper, we describe the process of developing learning progressions across three required aerospace engineering courses, one in each of years two, three, and four of the program. Our process thus far has included the theoretical development of six learning progression tracks: understanding of HCED, application of empathy-related processes, application of iteration-related processes, consideration of implementation dimensions, application of written and oral communication skills, and application of cognitive and social collaboration skills. These are categorized within three major competencies supported by literature: technical, global, and professional. Ultimately, we expect that the implementation of learning progression-related activities and assessment in earlier courses will result in a richer senior design experience, with students arriving to senior design demonstrating more developed competencies as a result of participating in strategically designed tracks.

We are currently implementing preliminary activities in each course and collecting data in the forms of classroom observations and pre-/post-test surveys to begin validating each progression track. While preliminary findings show promise, validation will not be completed until the first cohort in the year two course has graduated from the program. Thus, ongoing work will continue to track students as they move through the sequence of required courses. We also discuss expanding our piloted progressions to brainstorm a framework for tracking students’ competencies across all four years. Ongoing work seeks to validate and refine the progressions framework using evidence-based findings.