Assessing students' consideration of context in engineering design

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该工程教育研究奖授予华盛顿大学，将聘请研究人员开发一系列评估技术，供教师和学生使用，以评估学生在工程设计中对环境的考虑。成功地解决未来的重大挑战问题将要求工程师能够在社会和组织约束的更大复杂背景下放置工程问题和设计替代方案。这些评估将在四个不同的工程课程中进行测试。这项研究在严格调查用于培养学生在设计中考虑环境的方法的有效性方面具有变革性。此外，开发的评估将很容易在课堂环境中使用，而不是局限于研究实验室的劳动密集型评估方法。通过广泛使用这一评估工具，将促进对如何将环境融入工程教育的理解，并将使工程课程更好地为工程学生填补未来的工程工作做好准备。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)This engineering education research award to the University of Washington will employ researchers to develop a number of assessment techniques for use by both instructors and students to assess students' consideration of context in engineering design. Success in addressing grand challenge problems of the future will require that engineers be able to place engineering problems and design alternatives in the larger complex context of societal and organizational constraints. The assessments will be tested in four different engineering classes. This research is transformative in rigorously investigating the effectiveness of methods used to develop students' consideration of context in design. In addition the assessments developed will be easily used in a classroom setting rather than being limited to a research laboratory with labor intensive evaluation methods. Understanding of how to incorporate context into engineering education will be advanced by widespread use of this assessment tool and will lead to engineering programs which better prepare engineering students to fill future engineering jobs.