A Qualitative Study of a Course Trilogy in Biosystems Engineering Design

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2005 by Friesen, Marcia, Taylor, K Lynn, Britton, M G (Ron)

Several authors highlight difficulties inherent in assessment and evaluation in engineering design education experiences including multiple "right" answers, students working on different design problems, and a focus on process skills. These challenges are compounded when work is team-based, making individual effort difficult to identify and reward, and making team performance hard to compare across groups [12, 25-27].

Student performance in design courses is usually evaluated based on a combination of design histories (portfolios or journals), reports, completed design work (product), and formal examinations on domain knowledge. Evaluation of student performance is generally carried out by a combination of faculty-, industry representatives-, peer-, and self-evaluation [12, 14, 25, 28-3O]. The effectiveness of design courses is assessed by project sponsors, students and alumni, educators, job/graduate school placement results, employer surveys, student retention statistics, and feedback from the accrediting body [11, 12, 28].

Part of the challenge that educators face in assessing and evaluating engineering design education is a lack of guidance or credible precedent in the literature. Although evaluation studies often include positive comments from students, instructors, and industry sponsors who have participated in design courses, these studies vary widely in the quality of their design, the evidence reported, and the communication of the results [12, 28]. Only on limited occasions have articles included reporting an objective approach to weigh the benefits of course or curriculum innovations against costs (e.g., [13, 18, 19, 22, 31, 32]). A systematic approach to using both qualitative and quantitative measures to assess the effectiveness of the curriculum, faculty teaching, and the students' total experience is uncommon [33]. In response to these gaps in the literature, a study was designed to investigate the teaching and learning experiences in a design education initiative in a Biosystems Engineering program.

III. METHODOLOGY

A comprehensive examination of the DT experiences required a qualitative research methodology. Qualitative methodologies enable inquiry into understanding of a social or human condition, experience or problem, based on building a complex, holistic picture, formed textually and analyzed inductively [34]. Qualitative research typically engages a limited number of participants in a deep, systematic analysis of a phenomenon and is an appropriate research method when desired outcomes include description, interpretation, and a detailed understanding of that phenomenon [35]. In this study, data collection methods consisted of focus group interviews with DT students and in-depth one-on-one interviews with instructors of the DT courses and with industry cooperators in the DT courses. All participants were recruited using purposeful sampling [35], in which they were approached based on their ability to contribute to the goals of the study. As an initial investigation into the DT, the study provides a cross-sectional picture of the participants' experiences over one academic year. Twenty-one focus group and individual interviews were conducted between September 2002 and February 2003. All interviews were designed and carried out following established guidelines for long interviews [35, 36] and focus groups [35, 37]. A semi-structured interview protocol guided systematic data collection in both types of interviews, primarily exploring participants' definitions of design, approaches to teaching design (instructors) and experiences of learning design (students), perceptions of the role of the design instructor (students and instructors) and industry cooperators (industry cooperators), expectations for student learning in the DT courses (all), outcomes of the DT courses (all), and evaluation of the course model (all). These areas of inquiry reflected the major components of a conceptual framework for design education derived from the literature review.