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INCREASING STUDENT CONFIDENCE THROUGH EXPERIENTIAL DESIGN EXERCISES IN ENGINEERING SCIENCE COURSES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Gordon Krauss
Gordon Krauss*
Affiliation:
Harvey Mudd College
*
Krauss, Gordon, Harvey Mudd College, United States of America, gkrauss@g.hmc.edu

Abstract

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This study investigates the impact on student confidence of completing in-lecture engineering design activities focused on the application of specific engineering science topics within a materials engineering course. Many times, engineering science courses are taught with the expectation that the course content can be easily translated by students at a later time to apply in engineering design activities. By measuring student self-reported confidence across several related topics before and after completion of the in-lecture design exercises the impact of the exercises on student confidence has been quantified. On average, students have a lower than desired confidence in applying the specific materials engineering topics to a design problem after completing only the course content on the subject. Following completion of the related seventy-five minute design exercise, student confidence increased by a statistically significant degree. These results suggest that close integration of topical content learning with design application activity may be a useful method to improve engineering student confidence and, by extension, retention.

Keywords

Student confidenceDesign educationEducationDesign learning
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 3: ICED23 , July 2023 , pp. 2285 - 2294
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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