and a B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Technology, Jamaica. Her research interests are exploring students' disciplinary identity through engagement with knowledge, curriculum design, assessment and evaluation and teaching for conceptual understanding.
Background: Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under-preparing graduates for the realworld engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project-based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains.Purpose/Hypothesis: This study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper-level project-based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third-year design course influences these design perceptions.Design/Method: Concept maps about product design were collected from 105 third-year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions.Results: The analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business-related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market-related content.
Conclusion:This study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way
Design is a concept that means different things to different people. Even in the engineering design research community, there is little agreement on a consistent definition of design. This study looks into how engineering students understand product design, using a concept mapping exercise to elicit the key concepts and relationships present in their mental models. An analysis of concept maps from 130 third-year undergraduate engineering students shows how these students think about design, the common themes and relationships that are seen across the population, and variations across different groups of students. By understanding how students in the midst of ABET-accredited programs conceptualize design, conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness of existing curricula in instilling a complete understanding of holistic product design. This can lead to recommendations regarding future engineering design learning objectives, teaching materials, and activities.
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