Assessing Whether Engineering Students Are People-Focused or Thing-Focused
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engineers are often perceived as focusing more on the technical aspects of a product instead of on the users. Design methodologies such as human-centred design and co-design attempt to shift this focus from the artifact or device to the people who require the design. This study aims to develop a methodological approach to examine structured reflections to assess whether a student is people-focused or thing-focused. The weekly reflections of two summer students working on an accessibility project were categorized on a four-point scale and further analyzed based on the project phases. The results revealed that as the project progressed, there was a statistically significant shift in focus from people to things (p <.05). Individual differences were also observed, with one participant showing a stronger focus on client requirements while the other emphasized user needs. The findings suggest that engineering education could incorporate approaches promoting people-focus throughout the design process, particularly in later stages, to improve usability and technical feasibility. As this is a pilot study intended to develop a methodological approach, the small sample limits the generalizability of the findings, and future research will expand the sample size and validate an instrument.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".