2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress (WIP) paper communicates the impact of diary and reflection activities on students’ self-assessments of their learning in a first-year, studio-format undergraduate engineering design course. This work is implemented in an equity-minded frame to ensure that we support the learning and experience of all students. Students in first-year engineering design courses often ineffectively deploy design process phases and activities, which can limit their learning and negatively impact the quality of their deliverables. To further encourage students to intentionally engage in the appropriate design process phases and activities, we supplement our current instruction with a new activity that includes a modified time diary and a structured reflection activity. This work-in-progress paper begins analyzing our data to understand the role played by these activities in student learning.
We analyze students’ self-assessments of learning and engineering identity, with data sourced from pre- and post-term surveys, with a phased deployment of the diary and reflection activities across multiple semesters. Given our centering of equity-mindedness, we analyze demographic data to identify and attend to any equity gaps in student learning and experience. In this work-in-progress paper, we include a subset of Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) focused on the design process and teamwork and a single measure for students’ identity as engineers. Data are analyzed using a two-factor Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The factors include (1) the phased deployment of data-collection, diary, and reflection activities (PHASE), and (2) whether the student identifies as a member of a racial or ethnic group that is historically underrepresented in higher education (URM). This initial analysis identifies a statistically significant positive impact of the implemented diary and reflection activities on the student learning outcome “solve open-ended and ill-structured engineering problems” for students in the URM-identifying group. Beyond this outcome, this initial analysis also indicates that students report increased learning for engineering design outcomes but do not report a self-assessed growth in learning related to functioning effectively on teams. Furthermore, this course and the pilot activities, as currently implemented, do not enhance students’ sense of their engineering identity. These shortcomings require innovations that carefully consider student experience so that we effectively prepare technically excellent, collaborative, and confident engineers.