2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Characterizing Design Activity Engagement in Capstone Students and Working Engineers: Insights from NSF RFE

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Capstone design courses bridge academic training and professional practice, exposing students to open-ended design problems essential for engineering careers. However, effectiveness depends on engagement with design activities, influencing skill development and workplace readiness. Limited research has explored factors shaping engagement in capstone settings, particularly alignments between academic and professional contexts. Understanding engagement across student and professional contexts can inform strategies to enhance capstone courses for authentic challenges.

This work, supported by the National Science Foundation (Awards No. 2138019, 2138106, and 2514040), is an NSF Research on Formation of Engineers (RFE) project that investigates design activity engagement and identity motives in civil and mechanical engineering capstone students and practicing engineers. Using constructivist grounded theory informed by situated cognition and engineering practice engagement, it employs semi-structured interviews to develop contextualized models.

The student portion involved 72 interviews with 36 capstone students over three years at a research university. The resulting conceptual model illustrates how engagement emerges through the iterative process of comparing capstone expectations with course realities and reconciling the two to adjust future capstone engagement. Key influences include feedback, design processes, and outcomes, which are linked to identity affirmation and suggest ways to sustain engagement in capstone planning

The complementary professional portion is an independent but parallel study based on semi-structured interviews with 15 practicing civil, mechanical, and industrial engineers from diverse workplace settings, including consulting firms, government agencies, and industry organizations. This conceptual model of design activity engagement in professional contexts reveals how workplace dynamics shape sustained involvement. Key findings underscore collaboration as a cornerstone, intricately linked to engineers' professional identity formation and ongoing engagement. The study highlights how team interactions, cross-functional partnerships, and mentorship within authentic design projects foster a sense of belonging, motivation, and resilience, particularly under real-world pressures such as tight deadlines and resource constraints. These insights reflect the nuanced interplay between individual identity and collective design processes in professional settings.

By exploring synergies, tensions, and alignments across academic and workplace contexts, this work informs cross-disciplinary engineering education improvements. The poster includes independent sections for each population, with unifying implications for capstone enhancement to better mirror professional engagement dynamics.

Authors

Stephanie Adams Oregon State University [biography]

Stephanie Adams is currently enrolled as a doctoral student at Oregon State University, where she is working towards her PhD in Civil Engineering with a concentration in Engineering Education. Her current research focuses on the adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) among engineering faculty members. Additionally, she is investigating the identity development of engineering students in capstone courses.
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 the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education, where he has held multiple leadership positions. Dr. Huff serves as a Deputy Editor with the Journal of Engineering Education and serves on the editorial boards for Personality and Social Psychology Review and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 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 seventeen 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 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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