Design thinking among first‐year and senior engineering students: A cross‐sectional, national study measuring perceived ability

Abstract

BackgroundPrior researchers developed an instrument to measure perceived design thinking ability of first‐year students interested in engineering, and they validated the instrument through exploratory factor analysis.Purpose/HypothesisOur study uses the previously developed instrument to evaluate perceived design thinking ability of senior engineering students. We make a cross‐sectional comparison of this measure on a national scale.Design/MethodWe surveyed a national sample of senior engineering students in 2018 and conducted a cross‐sectional comparison with results from a 2012 national sample of first‐year students who were interested in declaring an engineering major. Two‐way analysis of variance tests compared average design thinking scores across sample groups. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to improve the design thinking instrument.ResultsFirst‐year students who intended to declare an engineering major score significantly higher (2.80) on the design thinking scale than senior engineering students (2.59) with a medium effect size of 0.4. The senior engineering sample performs significantly worse on the feedback seeking and experimentalism instrument items, but significantly better on the integrative thinking and collaboration items. We found no significant differences in perceived design thinking ability among engineering disciplines among senior students.ConclusionsFeedback seeking and experimentalism are traits that engineering educators should develop in their students to improve perceived design thinking ability. Incorporation of user‐centered design and divergent thinking in the engineering classroom are recommended as avenues to foster feedback seeking and experimentalism. We also offer recommendations to improve the design thinking instrument for future research.

Investigating Possibilities of Developing Self-Directed Learning in Architecture Students Using Design Thinking

“…The second design thinking shortcoming is in ability for ambiguity and uncertainty tolerance. These students are more likely to avoid tasks where the outcome, time needed and a path to the outcome are rather unclear, and thus we support the findings of [7,13,20,54,62]. It seems that a too generalised view and articulation of design thinking were used during design, which led to passive or surface learning.…”

“…Design thinking can be used either in classroom settings or beyond, e. g., distance learning, online, offline, or blended learning using different approaches, methods, and strategies in each single phase of design thinking that enables students' transfer of team learning. Employing different stakeholders or the content of different disciplines in design tasks can result in new knowledge and skills, especially creativity, innovativeness, digital skills, interpersonal skills, and creative self-efficacy and design flow experience [53,54]. Design thinking shows values such as practicality, ingenuity, empathy, and appropriateness as well as values rooted in humanity, e.g., subjectivity, imagination, commitment, and justice [55,56], as human-centred design is socially situated in values and sense making [56,57].…”

“…An engineering view on design describes it as a "systematic, intelligent process in which designers generate, evaluate, and specify concepts for devices, systems, or processes whose form and function achieve clients' objectives or users' needs while satisfying a specified set of constraints" [22] (p. 104), and as an educational approach, design and design thinking have been selectively applied to engineering and architecture curricula over a wide range of disciplines [54].…”

“…In addition, it may be that some subscales are also at risk, namely Abductive thinking, Creative confidence, Human centeredness, Team working, Experimentation, or learn from mistake or from failure. It could be that students with less pronounced design thinking in the aforementioned subscales have difficulties in problem definition, user experience design, creative ideation, and prototyping as argued by [24,54,56,88]. Therefore, students might have difficulties in achieving the SDGs [9], especially in design for partnership, design for resilient communities, and design for rethinking resources, where a need for transdisciplinary learning and systems thinking is desired [51,89].…”

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

“…Design cognition aims at measuring design reasoning, processes and patterns; divergent and convergent thinking; design fixation; design creativity; visual reasoning in design; design space co-evolution and design collaboration with design cognition tools, among others. Coley, Houseman & Roy (2007) point out that several popular methods can be exploited to study design thinking in terms of cognitive behavior such as the think-aloud method within protocol analysis, observation of sketching behavior, ethnography and diary methods, to which we can add black-box experiments, retrospective interviews (Dorta, Beaudry-Marchand & Pierini 2018) and surveys (Blizzard et al 2015;Coleman et al 2019). We can regroup these methods into three categories: social sciences methods; black-box experiments and protocol analysis as illustrated in Figure 1.…”