2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Characterizing design activity engagement: Summary of insights from Year Three - NSFR RFE

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Capstone design courses are an important part of engineering students’ training as they expose students to complex engineering design problems and include aspects of professional engineering. These open-ended design courses are presented as a transitional step between student’s academic and professional engineering careers.

By understanding and improving student engagement in design activities within capstone courses, educators can develop and solidify students’ engineering design skills and better prepare them for the transition into workplaces. Little research has been done on the factors impacting student engagement in capstone design courses.

In this paper, we aim to highlight how understanding the factors influencing civil and mechanical engineering students’ engagement in capstone design activities can affect course planning and translate to increased student engagement with capstone design activities.

Using our framework of design activity engagement developed through a grounded theory study founded by the NSF RFE program, we explore how our theoretical understanding of student engagement could be implemented throughout the development and implementation of capstone courses.

These results constitute a knowledge base upon which further research on engagement and motivation within capstone courses can be expanded. In addition, our findings could be used by capstone educators as a starting point in adapting and developing course activities and structure focused on fostering student design activity engagement. Expansion to different engineering fields and further considerations of professional engineering engagement will be needed to expand our understanding of motivation in design activity engagement and reach more fields and settings.

Authors

Elliott Clement Oregon State University [biography]

Elliott Clement is a doctoral student at Oregon State University. His current research is using grounded theory to understand identity and motivation within the context of capstone design courses. He is also part of a research team investigating context-specific affordances and barriers faculty face when adopting evidence-based instructional practices in their engineering courses.
Dr. James L. Huff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6693-5808 University of Georgia [biography]

Dr. James Huff is an Associate Professor within the Engineering Education Transformations Institute and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also serves as Deputy Editor with the Journal of Engineering Education and Chair of the Education Research and Methods Division in the American Society for Engineering Education. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue, and his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Harding.

Dr. Huff is a qualitative researcher whose work lies at the interdisciplinary nexus of engineering education research and applied personality and social psychology. An NSF CAREER Awardee, he is committed to fostering care as a central mindset of engineering and other professions through his in-depth examinations of personal lived experiences of identity and emotion, facets often hidden within professional domains. As Principal Investigator of the Beyond Professional Identity lab, Dr. Huff has mentored undergraduates, doctoral students, and professionals from over fifteen disciplines in conducting their qualitative investigations on psychological phenomena relevant to equity and well-being in workplaces and degree programs.
Dr. Shane A. Brown P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3669-8407 Oregon State University [biography]

Shane Brown is an associate professor and Associate School Head in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. His research interests include conceptual change and situated cognition. He received the NSF CAREER award in

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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