2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In four-year engineering programs, learning progressions, or strategic tracks that outline students’ learning journeys throughout the program, are important for tracking students’ competency development. These progressions are often informed by program educational objectives and can be used to develop formative assessment measures. Literature has defined the value of learning progressions in K–12 science and math education as well as how to design them in these contexts. However, these progressions are not well explored at the college level, particularly when it comes to focusing on human-centered engineering design (HCED). In previous work (blinded for review), we have argued that engaging students in HCED is integral to a well-rounded engineering curriculum that supports the development of both objective, technical skills and subjective, empathic skills. Thus, learning progressions that focus on HCED competency development need to be explored in four-year engineering programs.

In our ongoing collaboration with an accredited, four-year aerospace engineering program, we piloted the development of program-level learning progressions that connect directly to program educational objectives and ABET student learning outcomes. These built on previous work (blinded for review) that piloted our HCED framework at the course level. In recent work, we described the process of developing learning progressions across a sequence of three required aerospace engineering courses (one in each of years two, three, and four of the program) and collecting preliminary data. The progressions focused on the following six competencies: understanding of HCED; application of empathy-related skills; application of iteration-related skill; consideration of implementation dimensions; application of oral & written communication skills; and application of cognitive and social collaboration skills. Data collection included a validated pre-/post-test survey that had items pertaining to each learning progression. The survey was initially collected during the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters. Since then, we expanded the number of required courses in the study and issued the survey in multiple courses in the sequence during the Fall 2024 semester. Doing so allows us to continue tracking the first cohort of students over the course of multiple years in the program as well as begin tracking a new cohort for comparison data. Furthermore, our overall efforts continue to focus on building learning progressions throughout the program.

In this work-in-progress paper, we use statistical analysis, with comparisons by course and semester, to inspect students’ competency development. These findings are used to inform future course development efforts as well as empirically validate our learning progressions framework. Because our framework is intended for use at the program level, ongoing work will continue to track students as they move through the sequence of required courses toward graduation.