Asee peer logo

Developing a Human-Centered Engineering Design Self-Assessment Survey

Download Paper |

Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

June 26, 2024

Conference Session

Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM) Technical Session 25

Tagged Division

Educational Research and Methods Division (ERM)

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47149

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/47149

Download Count

78

Paper Authors

biography

Alexander Pagano University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

visit author page

Alex Pagano is a PhD student studying engineering design. His work is focused on the early phases of design and the use of human-centered design or design thinking as a teaching tool. Alex holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from University of

visit author page

biography

Taylor Tucker Parks University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

visit author page

Taylor Parks is a research fellow in engineering education at the Siebel Center for Design. She earned her bachelor's in engineering mechanics and master's in curriculum & instruction from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on promoting teamwork in complex engineering problem solving through collaborative task design. She currently co-leads the integration of human-centered design principles within select courses across the Grainger College of Engineering.

visit author page

biography

Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

visit author page

I am currently the Associate Director of Assessment and Research team at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work with a group of wonderful and talented people at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates our practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments.

My Research focuses on studying students’ collaborative problem solving processes and the role of the teacher in facilitating these processes in STEM classrooms.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

This paper outlines initial steps in the design, development, and validation of a human-centered engineering design (HCED) self-assessment survey. The survey consists of 17 items intended to measure students’ degree of confidence in HCED practices associated with the five conceptual spaces of the HCD framework: Understand, Synthesize, Ideate, Prototype, and Implement. The purpose of this instrument is to measure learning progression as a corollary of engagement with the various HCED learning experiences being deployed in diverse courses across the College of Engineering. The long-term goals of this work are to assess the impact of these various HCED learning experiences and to better understand how to facilitate the introduction of HCED into existing engineering curricula. This work will be relevant to readers interested in engineering education college-wide, working across multiple discipline-specific departments. We present the motivations for this work, including relevant education and learning science research supporting such endeavors. We explain the design and development of the instrument and its theoretical underpinnings. We explore the validity of the items using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha. An early deployment of this instrument reached students in six total courses at the 100-, 200-, and 300-levels. The responses from these groups are compared and discussed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these early findings as well as our intentions for future work. We believe that this tool will support engineering educators in assessing students’ confidence in HCED practices. This paper outlines the first steps in the design, development, and validation of a human-centered engineering design (HCED) self-assessment survey. This survey consists of 17 items intended to measure students’ degree of confidence in HCED practices associated with the five conceptual spaces of the HCD framework: Understand, Synthesize, Ideate, Prototype, and Implement. The purpose of this instrument is to measure learning progression as a corollary of engagement with the various HCED learning experiences being deployed in diverse courses across the Engineering College. The long-term goal of this work is to assess the impact of these various HCED learning experiences, and to better understand how to facilitate the introduction of HCED into the existing Engineering curriculum. This work will be relevant to readers interested in engineering education college-wide, working across multiple discipline-specific departments. We present the motivations for this work, including relevant education and learning science research supporting such endeavors. We explain the design and development of the instrument and its theoretical underpinnings. We explore the validity of the items using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha. An early deployment of this instrument reached students in six courses at the 100-, 200-, and 300-levels. The responses from these groups are compared and discussed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these early findings as well as our intentions for future work. We believe that this tool will support engineering educators in assessing students’ confidence in HCED practices.

Pagano, A., & Parks, T. T., & Shehab, S. (2024, June), Developing a Human-Centered Engineering Design Self-Assessment Survey Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47149

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015