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Teaching engineering design: Can reading a textbook make a difference?

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Abstract

Teaching design is an integral part of most engineering curricula. Often, students are introduced to the engineering design process through a chapter in a textbook. Does this passive approach to teaching an active process aid the students' learning? An experiment was conducted to assess what students learn about the design process when they read a text. Here, 10 students enrolled in a freshman course were asked to read aloud from a freshmen engineering textbook. Half of the subjects read the text prior to solving three open-ended engineering design problems and the other half solved the same problems before they read the text. Both the subjects' process in solving the problems, as well as the quality of their solutions (the product), are assessed. Results show that subjects that read the text before they solved the three problems spent significantly more time solving the problems and were more sophisticated in their problem solving strategies. These subjects also scored better when judged on the quality of their approach to the problem (including the number of design criteria considered, communications, assumptions, and technical accuracy). However, these subjects did not score better on a quality measure of the final solution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 1048 Benedum Hall, 15261, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Cynthia J. Atman & Karen M. Bursic

Authors
  1. Cynthia J. Atman
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  2. Karen M. Bursic
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Additional information

This research was made possible by National Science Foundation grants RED-9358516 and DUE-9254271 as well as grants from the Ford Motor Company Fund, GE Fund, Westinghouse Foundation, and Xerox Corporation.

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Atman, C.J., Bursic, K.M. Teaching engineering design: Can reading a textbook make a difference?. Research in Engineering Design 8, 240–250 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01597230

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