2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This education research and assessment paper presents findings from a pilot study exploring how undergraduate engineering students process information related to an open-ended design scenario. To develop solutions that adequately address stakeholder needs, engineers must be able to synthesize design-relevant information from various sources – such as stakeholders, benchmarked products, and secondary research – and apply this information to their engineering work. While prior research has described how engineering students may gather information for design tasks and what types of information are applied in their final deliverables, relatively few studies have explored the transition from gathering information to applying that information. In other words, there is a gap in our understanding of how engineering students determine information relevance for their design projects. Addressing this research gap is critical for providing effective support to students during early-stage design activities.

This pilot study used card sorting and semi-structured interviews to explore the information processing approaches of 10 undergraduate engineering students. Our research questions were: RQ1) How do undergraduate engineering students determine information relevance for an open-ended design scenario? And RQ2) How do engineering students organize “clearly relevant” information? We developed a design scenario – redesigning a campus study space – and prepared 25 pieces of information related to this scenario. We asked each participant to sort the 25 pieces of information into three piles: “clearly relevant to their engineering work,” “possibly relevant to their engineering work,” and “not relevant to their engineering work.” We also asked participants to sort their “clearly relevant” information into piles based on topic s of their choosing. Participants completed their sorting tasks without researcher support and afterwards were asked to describe their sorting approaches. To answer our research questions, the first author documented the reasons that each participant provided for how they sorted information into “clearly relevant,” “possibly relevant” and “not relevant” piles (RQ1) and how they sorted their “clearly relevant” information based on topic (RQ2). They then, in collaboration with the second author, compared participants’ responses to identify approaches that recurred across participants.

Related to RQ1, we identified two main ways that our participants determined information relevance. First, participants identified a central stakeholder – other students – and consistently identified information about students as “clearly relevant.” Information relating to additional stakeholders, such as faculty, alumni, and student organizations, was infrequently identified as “clearly relevant.” Second, participants determined that some information did not pertain to the physical design of the study space and thus was not “clearly relevant.” Related to RQ2, we identified four main sorting schemas used by participants to organize their clearly relevant information. The two most common schemas were the “distributed model,” where participants sorted information into two or more groups simultaneously, and the “centralized model,” where participants first formed one central group of information and then sequentially organized remaining information into additional related groups. Our findings illuminate specific details about how engineering students may process information related to open-ended design tasks and can inform pedagogies that support more effective practices for incorporating a range of design-relevant information into design activities.