SGER: Engineering in Context: An investigation of how experts and students incorporate global and societal issues in their engineering design processes

这项探索性研究的小额拨款将对口头协议数据进行深入分析，以探索工程本科生和工程专家在进行工程设计时如何界定问题的范围。它期望为学生和专家生成一套关于有效和无效问题范围以及信息收集(和使用)行为的详细案例研究。这些案例既可以作为设计学习体验的基础，帮助学生在工程设计过程中纳入全球和社会考虑因素，也可以作为评估工具来衡量他们实现这一目标的程度。这项拟议的研究解决了工程教育中的一个关键问题，并遵循了国家研究委员会最近发布的2020年工程师出版物中概述的原则。具体地说，该团队提出了一个重要的问题，可以通过实证研究来解决。这项工作借鉴了教育和设计界的相关理论，并将在实证工作中使用有充分记录的研究方法，使PI能够将结果与理论联系起来。它将使用来自不同学生的数据，为将我们的结果推广到更广泛的人群和环境提供基础。该项目通过两种方式解决更广泛的影响；首先，通过分析从不同的学生收集的设计过程数据来代表广泛的问题解决过程。第二，拟议工作的最终目标是增加工程学毕业生的数量，他们在毕业并加入工程学工作大军时考虑到工程设计问题的更广泛影响。拓宽学习工程学的背景，不仅使毕业生在其职业生活中更具社会和文化响应性，而且还有助于创造一种对女性和目前代表性不足的少数族裔学生更具响应性和吸引力的教育氛围。

This Small grant for Exploratory Research will conduct an in-depth analysis of verbal protocol data to explore how both undergraduate engineering students and engineering experts go about defining the scope of the problem as they do engineering design. It expect to generate a set of detailed case studies of both effective and ineffective problem scoping and information gathering (and use) behavior for students and experts. These cases can be used as the basis to design both learning experiences to help students incorporate global and societal considerations in their engineering design processes as well as assessment instruments to gauge how well they accomplish this goal. The proposed research addresses a critical issue in engineering education and adheres to the principles outlined in a recent Nation Research Council publication Engineer of 2020. Specifically, the team pose an important question that can be addressed by empirical research. The work draws on relevant theories from the education and design communities and will use well documented research methods in empirical work that will enable the PI to link results back to the theories. It will use data from a diverse set of students, providing the groundwork to generalize our results to broader populations and settings. This project addresses broader impacts in two ways; first, by be analyzing design process data that was collected from a diverse set of students to represent a broad range of problem solving processes. Second, the ultimate goal of the proposed work is to increase the number of engineering graduates who consider the broader impacts of the engineering design problems as they graduate and join the engineering workforce. Broadening the context within which learning engineering takes place not only prepares graduates to be more socially and culturally responsive in their professional lives, but it also helps to create an educational climate that is more responsive and attractive to women and currently underrepresented minority students.