A Preliminary Study of the Design Approaches to Project Work Taken by Undergraduate Engineering Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report on a preliminary study of discrete design processes and their timing, when undergraduate engineering students undertake project work. The method of the study followed the approach undertaken by others1,2 where the project design cycle is broken into discrete stages, for example problem definition, modeling, feasibility analysis and communication. In these previous studies the design was over approximately 3 hours1 using a single session design problem and required talking aloud by the designer, so that an observer could assess the stages being undertaken at given time intervals. Our study is over one or two terms and uses self-reporting by students to the criteria. Weekly emails prompted students with individualized links to a webform to report the type of design work done in the previous week. Because a week is a relatively long interval, the web form asks the students to report in terms of their primary (most effort and time) and secondary tasks. Similar to previous studies, this study compares the time spent and the points in the design cycle when certain process are undertaken or revisited. Our results, however, describe the design process over various durations (one term projects or full-year capstone projects), for different years of study (primarily, third and fourth year), different fields of engineering (from Aerospace, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical as well as Systems) and finally for different sized teams (from pairs of students in course projects to teams of twenty in Mechanical and Aerospace capstone projects). Comparisons will also be made between the design processes of different students, based on their final grade for their project. This first year of study is seen as a preliminary year to a longer and broader study, and the paper present our preliminary results as well as lessons learned in the areas of self-reporting and sizeable, longer-term data collection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".