Dringenberg, E., & Wertz, R. E. H. (2016, June), How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument  Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.25474

\bibitem{asee_peer_25474}
  Dringenberg, E., \& Wertz, R. E. H. (2016, June), \emph{How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument}
  Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana.
  10.18260/p.25474

Emily Dringenberg and Ruth E. H. Wertz.  "How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument".  2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2016.  https://peer.asee.org/25474 Internet.  11 Jan, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_25474}
  Emily Dringenberg and Ruth E. H. Wertz.
  "How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument".
  \emph{2016 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2016, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2016.
  https://peer.asee.org/25474 Internet.  11 Jan, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_25474
author = "Emily Dringenberg and Ruth E. H. Wertz"
title = "How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument"
booktitle = "2016 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2016"
month = "June"
address = "New Orleans, Louisiana"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/25474}
number = {10.18260/p.25474}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - 
Design is widely recognized as a keystone of engineering practice.  Within the context of engineering education, design has been categorized as a type of ill-structured problem solving that is crucial for engineering students to engage with.  Improving undergraduate engineering education requires a better understanding of the ways in which students experience learning to engage with ill-structured problems in the form of engineering design.  With special attention to the experiences of first-year engineering students, prior exploratory work identified two critical themes that organized ways students’ experienced design from less to more comprehensive: the way students perceive the role of multiple perspectives and the way students react to ambiguity.  

The goal of current (work-in-progress) research is to develop and pilot a self-report instrument to assess students’ relation to the key thresholds identified in prior research at the completion of an ill-structured design project within the context of undergraduate engineering education. The specific research questions addressed in this study are 1) if the piloted self-report instrument can be used to identify discrete constructs, and 2) how these constructs align with prior qualitative research findings.

The objective of this study will be addressed using a quantitative exploratory research design. Items for the self-report Likert-scaled instrument were designed based upon prior exploratory qualitative research. The instrument was disseminated to a total of 214 first-year engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the constructs that emerge from the self-report data, and these constructs were compared to the outcome spaced identified previously.

The results of this investigation will be used to help advance progress towards identifying needs for intervention or explicit instruction related to engineering design, tracking student growth over time, and, with further development, providing evidence for ABET student outcomes.

AU  - Emily Dringenberg
AU  - Ruth E. H. Wertz
CY  - New Orleans, Louisiana
DA  - 2016/06/26
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - How Do First-Year Engineering Students Experience Ambiguity in Engineering Design Problems: The Development of a Self-Report Instrument
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/25474
DO  - 10.18260/p.25474
ER  -