Students’ Self-Regulated Strategies for an Engineering Design Project: An Exploratory Study of College Freshmen

• In Event: Researching Self- and Coregulated Learning as Situated in Contexts: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice

Abstract

Design is a core competency and a central part of engineering education. But, because design tasks are complex and ill-structured, they present challenges for students and professional engineering designers alike. Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are essential in tasks such as engineering design that involve ambiguous goal specifications, lack a clear solution path, and require integration of multiple knowledge domains (Paris & Winograd, 1990; Reitman, 1965; Sheppard, Macatangay, Colby, & Sullivan, 2009). Thus, as a critical step towards supporting successful design activity, the research reported here investigated how self-regulated learning was implicated in the design performance of first-year college students studying in engineering.

Butler and Cartier’s SRL model (2005) was drawn on to conceptualize and investigate SRL because it identifies the interconnections among affect, motivation, cognition, metacognition, and self-regulation in complex activities. To explore cognitive processes in engineering design, this study used Dym and Little’s (2009) model, which identifies necessary activities across five design phases: problem definition, conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design, and design communication (see Figure 1). Integrating across these two frameworks, the study aimed to: (1) build and field-test a survey instrument designed to evaluate aspects of SRL and cognition within an engineering design task; and (2) evaluate the extent to which students’ interpretation of task demands (see Butler & Cartier, 2004) within a design project were reflected in their working plans and reported use of monitoring/regulating strategies.

To achieve these objectives, an engineering design questionnaire (EDQ) was developed based on Butler and Cartier’s SRL model. There were three subsections of the EDQ, administered before, during, and after a design task, respectively, that collectively captured the main SRL features included in the Butler and Cartier model, including personal goals, task interpretation, and planning strategies (section 1); perceptions about cognitive and monitoring/fix-up strategies employed (section 2), and judgments about design outcomes (section 3). Dym and Little’s five design phases were integrated in the EDQ to define the “core” questionnaire items.

Participants in this pilot study were 70 Mechanical Engineering students (67 males and 3 females). Data from across the three subsections of the EDQ were evaluated using statistical and graphical strategies. Findings suggested that, in general, students did a reasonable job of identifying demands of design activities (M=3.39 out of 4) and that these task interpretations aligned with criteria they applied to judge performance. But findings also suggested gaps between task interpretation and reported action across design phases. For example, in relation to Dym and Little’s model, gaps in strategic action were reported in planning to support problem definition, communicating designs, and monitoring/fixing-up actions during preliminary and detailed design phases. In the poster, the significance of these observed gaps between task interpretation and reported action will be elaborated. Also described will be ways in which this research is being extended to allow for collecting and juxtaposing different types of data (e.g., the EDQ in relation to traces of design activity) to create a fuller picture of self-regulation and cognition as they are implicated in successful design activity.

Authors

• Oenardi Lawanto, Utah State University

• Sylvie C. Cartier, University of Montreal