Collaborative Research: Assessment of Product Archaeology as a Platform for Contextualizing Engineering Design

许多工程专业努力满足认证要求，即所有工程专业的学生都必须“接受广泛的教育，以理解工程解决方案在全球、经济、环境和社会背景下的影响”。因此，工科学生以零敲碎打的方式获得有意义的背景经验，毕业时缺乏在他们生活和工作的全球世界中连接知识和实践的具体能力。通过将产品视为具有根植于其发展历史的设计文物，产品考古学框架将考古学的概念与网络增强产品解剖的进步相结合，以实施解决重大教育差距的教学创新。以考古学的思维方式，学生通过评估和理解产品（及其设计师）的全球，社会，经济和环境背景和影响的任务来进行产品解剖。这些动手、归纳的学习活动要求学生超越死记硬背的知识，磨练他们的工程判断，扩展和完善他们的知识，并以有意义的方式将他们的知识应用于现实挑战。因此，这种教学框架为学生提供了正式的活动，以更广泛地思考他们作为工程师的专业角色。该项目由6所大学合作，重点评估在产品考古框架内开发的练习的学习成果。通过记录每个学校练习的实施特征（例如，这门课程是必修课还是选修课，有多少学生注册，是设计还是分析课程，等等），并从定量和定性两方面评估学习成果，该项目正在开发强有力的证据，证明哪些因素使工程专业的学生能够理解他们的决策的更广泛影响。

Many engineering programs struggle to meet the accreditation requirement that all engineering students have "the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context." As a result, engineering students receive meaningful contextual experiences in a piecemeal fashion and graduate with a lack of concrete competencies that bridge knowledge and practice in the global world in which they live and work. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, the product archaeology framework combines concepts from archaeology with advances in cyber-enhanced product dissection to implement pedagogical innovations that address the significant educational gap. With an archaeological mindset, students approach product dissection with the task of evaluating and understanding a product's (and its designers') global, societal, economic and environmental context and impact. These hands-on, inductive learning activities require students to move beyond rote knowledge to hone their engineering judgment, extend and refine their knowledge, and apply their knowledge in meaningful ways to realistic challenges. This pedagogical framework thus provides students with formal activities to think more broadly about their professional roles as engineers. This project, which is a collaboration among 6 universities, focuses on assessing the learning outcomes of exercises developed within the product archaeology framework. By documenting the implementation characteristics of the exercises at each school (for example, is the course a required or elective course, how many students are enrolled, is it a design or analysis course, etc.) and assessing the learning outcomes both quantitatively and qualitatively, the project is developing strong evidence of what factors enable engineering students to develop an understanding of the broader impacts of their decisions.