2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this Complete Research Paper, we investigate how first-year students in two departments navigate the same design challenge. Design challenges are difficult for students because of the nature of these problems. They are ill-structured [1], meaning there are many possible satisficing solutions, as well as many possible paths toward solution, requiring designers to frame the problem by deciding what to focus on about the problem. This aspect also makes teaching design difficult, especially in the first-year when students have completed little to none of their technical coursework. To overcome this issue, faculty sometimes reduce the complexity by making the design problem purely technical, removing social and policy factors. However, this approach can actually make the problem more difficult for students, by obscuring the problem context and meaning. Another way faculty address the issue is by reducing the ill-structuredness, providing kit-based projects in which students lack opportunities to frame the problem. Research on design learning demonstrates that offering ill-structured, authentic problems increases student capacity to frame and solve engineering problems, in turn supporting their identity as engineers [2]. In particular, such problems are sociotechnical, meaning the technical factors are related to and depend upon social factors [3].

We sought to investigate how first-year students navigated such a design challenge, guided by a research question:

In what ways do first-year engineers navigate ill-structured sociotechnical design challenges?

We conducted the study in two introductory courses at an R1 university in the southwestern US: a 3-credit Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering course (CCEE, n=81) and a 1-credit Chemical and Biological Engineering course (CBE, n=49). We developed an ill-structured design challenge centered around the Gold King Mine spill in 2015. This disaster released pollution into waterways across the southwest, including water sources that rural communities need to survive. We asked students to identify a community in our state that would be impacted by a mine drainage spill and design a water remediation solution for that specific community. They tested their solutions in a simulation before moving to a bench-scale test. Their final solution included a plan for community engagement. Scaffolded deliverables guided them on identifying the problem, researching current solutions, and drawing conclusions from their data.

To conduct the study we engaged in design-based research, which instantiates learning theory in the instruction and tests it iteratively in the classroom [4]. Data included team deliverables, a survey of their perceptions of the design problem, and group interviews with teams after the bench-scale design test (CCE n = 4, CBE n = 4).

We found that in both courses, teams contextualized the challenge to the community they chose. Students targeted a wide range of communities to design remediation for, from towns and cities to extremely rural ranch land, all of which required different types of remediation efforts i.e community infrastructure and water requirements. In their final proposal students articulated the reasons for their decisions, and connected collected data to their solution.

In their end of design surveys, students reported that the choices they made increased their ownership of their design, that they learned as a result of those decisions, and that they had a better understanding of what it took to be an engineer.

In post-experiment interviews, students discussed the challenge of being unsure about how to move forward, but also overcoming those challenges to reach their data collection goals. They expressed the desire to get the answer “right” and that they weren’t sure what right should be. However, this was more of a focus in iterations related to CCEE rather than CBE, with CBE students being more comfortable with the ill-structured nature of the experiment.

Overall we found students leveraged the sociotechnical nature to navigate the ill-structured challenge and took ownership of their decisions as engineers

References
[1] Jonassen, D. H. (2000). Toward a design theory of problem solving. Educational Technology Research and Development, 48(4), 63-85. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02300500
[2] Svihla, V., Wilson-Fetrow, M., Chen, Y., Chi, E. Y., Datye, A. K., Han, S. M., Gomez, J. R., & Olewnik, A. (2021). The educative design problem framework: Relevance, sociotechnical complexity, accessibility, and nondeterministic high ceilings. Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, 1-17. https://peer.asee.org/37852
[3] Smith, J. M., & Lucena, J. C. (2020). Socially responsible engineering. In The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering (pp. 661-673). Routledge.
[4] The Design-Based Research Collective. (2003). Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 5–8. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001005