A Multimodal Exploration of Engineering Students' Emotions and Electrodermal Activity in Design Activities

Abstract

Background This exploratory study uses multimodal approaches to explore undergraduate student engagement via topic emotions and electrodermal activity (EDA) in different engineering design method activities and with different instructional delivery formats (e.g., lecture vs. active learning). Purpose/Hypothesis The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of how students respond, via engagement, to their engineering design activities during class. This study hypothesizes that students would experience no self‐reported mean changes in topic emotions from their preassessment scores for each engineering design topic and instructional format nor would electrodermal activities (EDA) associate to these topic emotions throughout the design activities. Design/Method Eighty‐eight freshmen engineering students completed online pretopic and posttopic emotions surveys for five engineering design activities. A subset of 14–18 participants, the focal point of this study, wore an EDA sensor while completing the surveys and participating in these sessions. Results Preliminary findings suggest that EDA increased for individual and collaborative active learning activities compared to lectures. No significant changes in EDA were found between individual and collaborative active learning activities. Moderate negative correlations were found between EDA and negative topic emotions in the first engineering design activity but not across the rest. At the end of the semester, active learning activities showed higher effect sizes indicating a re‐enforcement of students' engagement in the engineering design method activities. Conclusion This study provides initial results showing how multimodal approaches can help researchers understand students' closer‐to‐real‐time engagement in engineering design topics and instructional delivery formats.

A framework for studying design thinking through measuring designers’ minds, bodies and brains

“…The EDA accounts for a strong emotion but the correlation with its valence (quality of emotion, positive or negative) is unclear. In their study, Villanueva et al (2018) looked at engineering students' emotions in different learning situations (passive and active learning) and workshop topics (problem statement, generation of ideas, selection of design solutions, prototyping, presenting design solution). This study showed an increase in EDA for active and collaborative learning compared to passive learning.…”

“…Learning design in the studio implies social and collaborative learning, where tutors adapt their comments to students based on their perceived abilities. Obtaining data on students' engagement and emotions during a course points out the effect of teaching methods on students (Villanueva et al 2018). The design studio pedagogy is partly implicit, and tutors with professional backgrounds tend to teach without any pedagogical training.…”

Unpacking professional shame: Patterns of White male engineering students living in and out of threats to their identities

“…Such a focus is related to Pekrun's (2006) concept of shame as an achievement emotion or “emotions tied directly to achievement activities or achievement outcomes” (p. 317), which has characterized the framing of how shame has been studied in educational research (Paoloni et al, 2014; Tempelaar et al, 2012; Villavicencio, 2011). While we are not aware of engineering education studies that have explicitly investigated shame, we do note that extant research on emotions in engineering domains are aligned with Pekrun's (2006) framework of achievement emotions (Atiq, 2018; Kellam et al, 2018; Villanueva et al, 2018).…”

Emotions in engineering education: Towards a research agenda

“…This is also true for research in engineering education: the few existing studies on emotions in engineering education rely on individual and cognitivist perspectives on emotions. The focus of that research is on emotions as individual competencies or experiences, such as empathy [6], shame [7], and frustration [8] (see also [9,10]). In the broader educational literature, however, there is today an emerging body of research from discourse analytic perspectives that explores emotions as social and cultural phenomena.…”