2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The engineering fraternity is required to make critical decisions and demonstrate leadership to develop technological innovations. However, during a typical BTech program the engineering students are not taught about effective decision-making or leadership, as these are considered to be management modules, and outside the core engineering curriculum. This research paper, based on a case study from a new technology university in India will present a pedagogical innovation that centers research design as an effective pedagogical tool to teach decision-making and leadership skills. To test this, we collected data on three major questions: student perception of the importance of decision-making and leadership, actual student performance in the course, and student perception on effectivity of research design as a pedagogical tool in making engineering students learn better decision-making and leadership skills.
Data was collected from 78 second year BTech students enrolled at a university in India who participated in the course “research design and decision-making”. Both quantitative and qualitative data along with student course performance data were analyzed to answer the research questions. Findings of this research showed that there was a significantly high perceived importance for skills like critical thinking, decision-making and leadership among participants. Furthermore, student performances in the course were significantly higher than expected, showing higher retention of the skills taught. Additionally, students rated the effectiveness of research pedagogy in teaching the skills of critical thinking and decision-making significantly higher than expected. The study results prove that decision-making and leadership skills can be organically brought into engineering when research design is used as a pedagogical tool for teaching about decision-making explicitly.