2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Exploring Student Engagement and Project Outcomes in Capstone Design: Insights from a Grounded Theory Study

In this Empirical Research Brief, we present selected findings from a grounded theory study examining student engagement in design activities within an engineering capstone course.

Capstone courses, a staple in engineering programs, represent both the culmination of students’ academic journey and a step towards their professional careers. Engagement in these design activities is crucial for students to demonstrate their knowledge and practice key professional skills, however, little research has been done on students’ design activity engagement in the context of capstone courses.
Understanding and improving student design activity engagement in capstone design could ultimately improve their readiness for the engineering profession.

We present insights from a broader grounded theory study, drawing on data from interviews with 31 students participating in capstone design courses. Our findings are derived from an in-depth analysis of these interviews.

Our analysis demonstrates a novel framework for understanding how students engage in capstone design courses. Specifically how feedback, processes and outcomes impact design activity engagement throughout a capstone project. In this paper, we focus on the influence of project outcomes on student engagement in design activities, and define three types of outcomes: perceived outcomes, adapted outcomes, and reflected outcomes. These definitions account for the evolving nature of outcomes in open-ended projects such as capstone designs, and reflect how students perceived, adapted to, and reflected upon project outcomes throughout their engagement in capstone.

These results offer valuable insights into student engagement in capstone design activities and could help make these courses more engaging, potentially improving students' readiness for the professional engineering world. Further research is required to expand these findings to different disciplines and to examine how professional engineers engage with design activities.

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. 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
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.

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