Development of a Concept Inventory for Functional Reasoning

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This project at the University of Illinois at Chicago will help to improve the ability of engineering students to design technological products by creating and testing a means to assess functional reasoning capabilities. Functional reasoning is the ability to conceive of a task required in an engineering design problem as accomplished by a set of steps or functions. Functional reasoning allows engineers to decompose a mechanical system and correctly analyze it in terms of the functions performed by its subsystems and features. This project will develop a validated method to assess student understanding of function. Assessment of functional reasoning ability will improve engineering education and increase retention of students in engineering by helping faculty to more precisely determine the nature of the difficulties some students have in developing functional reasoning skills. The work will include a collaboration between faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and faculty at community colleges.This work will develop and validate a concept inventory for functional reasoning as a means to help promote thoughtful and effective teaching of functional reasoning to undergraduate students. Project personnel will apply accepted best practices in the development of the concept inventory. The approach will use Delphi study methods as a structured means to solicit information from experts in the content of functional design methods. While engineering function is often covered in senior-level engineering courses, this project will consider the teaching of functional reasoning in the context of design courses for first year engineering students. The project team anticipates that facility with functional reasoning may correlate with certain demographic variables; and a diverse and well-educated pool of engineers will depend upon a thoughtful, considered approach to teaching and learning about function. The project team includes engineering faculty with expertise in engineering design methodologies as well as collaborators from the learning sciences. The outcome of the work will be a concept inventory to assess functional reasoning ability in engineering students.