2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Introduction:

A central goal in engineering education is developing students’ design thinking for creative real-world problem solving [1], [2]. Design thinking provides engineers a comprehensive set of principles for approaching diverse and emergent authentic challenges through deep needs assessment, contextualized problem definition, creative idea generation, and constructive iterative phases of implementing, testing, and improving a solution [3]. It is expected that engineering students will transfer principles of design thinking (DT) they learn in their courses to new situations and problems [4]. Yet, decades of research demonstrated people commonly fail to transfer, and that promoting transfer is very challenging [4], [5], [6], [7].

We use the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) [8] to conceptualize the use of DT strategies based in the person’s situated role identity—who they believe they are in a particular situation, and whether their role calls for using design thinking [8]. Correspondingly, use of design thinking in a new situation occurs when the person transfers strategies learned in one role identity to another role identity. We hypothesized that engaging students who learn design thinking in one role identity (Biodesign student in Biodesign course) in imagining using those design thinking strategies in other role identities (future Capstone student, future Engineer, another concurrent life role) would promote transfer of these DT strategies into those other role identities when students occupy them.

Methods:

In an IRB-approved study protocol, sixteen students (of 22) in a Biodesign course in a large research university consented to participate. This course, consisting of required weekly lecture and laboratory sessions, is a pre-requisite to the students’ senior capstone course. This class is used to reinforce learning about the DT process through several design modules, each requiring a complete cycle through the design process, including prototyping and testing. For the study, students were tasked with creating weekly reflective journals describing their use of DT strategies. At each module’s end, students also created a DSMRI-informed summary reflection involving imagining DT use in future roles. We used a combined deductive-inductive analysis of course observations and students’ reflections to identify emerging themes about students’ engagement in transfer of DT.

Results and Discussion:

Two major themes gleaned thus far highlight: (1) Students’ difficulty in converting abstract conceptions of DT from lectures into applications in laboratory projects. This suggests a discrepancy between students’ role identities of “lecture attendant” (passive) and “lab participant” (active) that may explain failure in near transfer of DT. (2) Student reflections suggest interpretations of success and failure in laboratory tasks as implying the student’s overall capacity within the engineering field. Failure elicited feelings of inadequacy that pointed to the fragility of engineering identity, even among senior students, implicating a need to reframe the meaning of failure within engineering education.

Acknowledgements: Funding for the project is provided by NSF RIEF proposal #2306219.