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 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 | 0.009 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".