Keywords: design, context, women
Considering Context: A Study of First-Year Engineering Students
As engineers contribute to solving the increasingly complex problems facing our society, there is a growing
need for the engineers graduating from undergraduate programs to deeply understand the context within which they
are solving problems. There is a particular need for engineers who recognize the complexities of global and
societal issues and respond to those complex issues with the solutions they develop.
Implications of Findings
The finding that students who emphasized context (the riverbank and surroundings from a natural and social perspective)
in the Midwest Floods (MWF) problem also were likely to emphasize context in the information gathering task suggests
that there is an aspect of the student’s ability and inclination to situate design problems in context more generally
that is not an artifact of a particular design problem itself nor the student’s knowledge of or interest in the task
domain.
| The gender differences in the present study suggest that first-year women are more ready than
men to do engineering in context, yet the literature shows that they are less likely to be recruited and retained.
|
Our findings that women emphasized design context more than men suggest that first-year students’ experiences,
interests, and ways of knowing are also sources of this variation in how broadly students scope design problems.
As discussed below, women and men tend to exhibit differences in patterns of intellectual development, and women
may perceive that there is a mismatch between what engineering has to offer them and what and how they know about
their world. This is especially unfortunate if first-year women’s greater emphasis on context is associated with
their different ways of knowing, because those who are discouraged from engineering leave for precisely the reasons
we want them to stay. The gender differences in the present study suggest that first-year women are more ready
than men to do engineering in context, yet the literature shows that they are less likely to be recruited and
retained.
While difficult to achieve, there is still a practical need to have graduating students achieve the ABET outcomes
described previously and enter the work world better prepared to participate in the global society. There is also
a need to support the engineering faculty who typically teach design courses, some of whom do not have the
experience or expertise to develop classroom materials to teach these topics. Both the students and the faculty
need access to research-informed classroom materials and assessment instruments to ensure that engineering students
include global and societal issues in their engineering design processes.
Method and Background
The importance of incorporating contextual issues into the undergraduate curriculum is widely acknowledged in the
engineering education community. ABET 2000 assessment criteria incorporate context in two of the eleven learning
outcomes expected to be achieved by engineering graduates. The recent National Academy of Engineering report "The
Engineer of 2020" strongly stated, "Successful engineers in 2020 will, as they always have, recognize the broader
contexts that are intertwined in technology and its application in society."
The Academic Pathways Study (APS) research element of CAEE is a multi-institution, mixed-method, longitudinal
study which examines engineering students’ learning and development. Data were collected from forty students at
each of four CAEE institutions for a total of 160 participants using surveys, structured interviews, and ethnographic
observations. Students were also asked to perform simple engineering tasks during timed sessions at the conclusion
of interviews. This paper describes a subset of the first-year data gathered for the APS—findings from a brief
engineering design task and findings from an engineering design question in the spring survey in the first year of
the study.
Midwest Floods Problem
In Spring 2004, 124 first-year students were asked, “Over the summer the Midwest experienced massive flooding of
the Mississippi River. What factors would you take into account in designing a retaining wall system for the
Mississippi?” Students were given 10 minutes to write down their answers on paper.
The MWF problem has been used in previous studies of design behavior in engineering students. The problem is
intended to provide a problem-scoping goal orientation, directing respondents to think about the constraints, or
factors, to be considered given a proposed solution approach to a broad-based, real-world problem.
A coding scheme was used that categorized factors as detail- or context-oriented, based on a finer-grained
coding scheme (for details, see full text article at the link below).
Information-Gathering Question
In addition to the paper-and-pencil task, a quantitative survey that collected data on the students’ experiences
and engagement in their higher education was administered twice in each year of the APS. During the spring
administration in their first year, we asked students to answer a closed-ended question about the information they
would need to design a playground (adequately answered by 143 students). The students were asked to select five
kinds of information (from a total of 16 options) “you would most likely need as you work on your design.” The
purpose of the information-gathering task was to orient respondents toward the information-gathering component of
the design process.
Interpreting the Data
We were interested in the extent to which students situated the MWF and playground information-gathering problems
in context.
For the MWF problem, we used the concepts of design detail and design context to quantify and compare students’
breadth of problem-scoping. Ideas focused on the wall or the water and from a technical or logistical perspective
were interpreted to be oriented toward the detail of the design problem. All other ideas were considered oriented
toward the context of the design problem (for a detailed description, see the paper at the link below). An analogous
interpretation for the data gathered for the playground design task was developed. This interpretation of the kinds
of information needed to perform this task was categorized as detail- or context-oriented.
What We Found
Midwest Floods Problem
Certain kinds of factors were much more frequently cited in the responses—the (wall, logistical) code pair being
the most frequent. This code pair, together with (wall, technical) and (water, natural), accounted for over half
of the segments. The code pair (wall, logistical) comprised factors such as the site (location) for the wall, how
and when the wall would be constructed, and budget considerations. The next most frequent code pair, (wall,
technical), comprised factors such as the dimensions of the wall and the materials from which it would be constructed.
The code pair (water, natural) matched segments discussing the natural phenomena of rainfall, flooding, water
level, etc.
At least in aggregate, the study participants seemed to give substantial consideration to both detail- and
context-oriented factors. Technical and logistical factors related to the wall design dominated the detail-oriented
factors. Among the context-oriented factors, participants more frequently considered the natural environment than
social factors.
Women’s responses contained more segments by a statistically significant margin. On average, women’s responses
consisted of about 13 segments, and men’s responses consisted of 10 to 11 segments. No gender difference was found
in the number of detail-oriented segments, however, women’s responses included a statistically significant greater
number of context-oriented responses than men’s. On average, women appeared to be paying more attention than men
to context-oriented factors, but not at the expense of detail-oriented factors.
Information-Gathering Task
For each of the 16 kinds of information, we computed the percentage of participants who included it as one of
their 5 selections. Budget and Safety were the most commonly selected kinds of information, with over 75% of
participants including one or both of them among their 5 most needed. In contrast, less than 10% of participants
selected Utilities and Supervision concerns, possibly because the meaning of those items was less clear.
Given the gender differences in context-orientation in the MWF problem responses, an analogous analysis for gender
differences was performed for the playground responses. Women tended to select more context-oriented kinds of
information than the men, with the difference for 6 of the 16 kinds of information being statistically significant.
A larger percentage of the men included three detail-oriented items in their selections: Budget, Material costs, and
Labor availability and cost. On the other hand, a larger percentage of the women selected three context-oriented
items: Neighborhood demographics, Handicapped accessibility, and Utilities.
Combined Data Sets
The MWF problem and playground information-gathering question are very different in format and provide different
kinds of data. However, responses to both questions yield quantitative measures of the extent to which students
consider the context of a specific engineering design problem. We examined the correlation between the number of
context-oriented segments from MWF and the number of context-oriented kinds of information from playground
information-gathering (115 participants had responses for both questions). The correlation between the two counts
is indeed positive and significant, if not particularly strong.
In both the MWF and playground information-gathering responses, we observed a variety of problem-scoping
approaches. Although the factors students most frequently cited were detail-focused (logistical and technical
details related to the retaining wall), most students were relatively balanced in their emphasis on detail and
context.
Having found that beginning engineering students, particularly women, are sensitive to important contextual factors,
we suggest that efforts to broaden participation in engineering should consider legitimizing and fostering
context-oriented approaches to engineering earlier in the curriculum.
Authors: Deborah Kilgore, Cynthia J. Atman, Ken Yasuhara, Theresa J. Barker, and Andrew Morozov
Source: Paper presented at 2007 ICREE Conference; published in Journal of Engineering Education Special Edition, 2007,
Vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 321-334.
The paper can be viewed on the ASEE (JEE) website.
For a printable pdf of this research brief, click here.
Brief created August 2007
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