When Good Intentions Fail
How an ‘authentic’ design assignment prompted made-up solutions.
By Andrea M. Goncher and Aditya Johri
We present, contrary to most research findings, a sobering account of how efforts to make engineering education more authentic did not produce the intended results. The disproportionate attention students paid to institutional and organizational constraints, such as grades, while working on a realistic first-year design project interfered with their learning about engineering design practices and led them to fudge results.
Our study closely followed four teams, each with four students, over the course of an eight-week design project for an introductory engineering course. The project’s goal was to develop a sustainable energy solution and create a prototype within a $20 budget. To collect data under a qualitative case study approach, we video recorded team meetings and interviewed teams at the end of the project. We also had access to all of the teams’ design artifacts, such as sketches, reports, and team-member evaluations.
Our initial aim was to better understand what aspects of the problem guided students’ design decisions and whether they followed the design practices taught in their engineering course. In other words, we hoped to see if designing sustainable solutions, brainstorming, and prototyping were effective in achieving the intended learning outcomes.
As the theoretical framework for this study, we used nested structuration theory, which explains how societal contexts affect individual or team work patterns. Using this theory to analyze the data yielded a surprising result. We discovered that the educational goals of the design project were less salient to the students than the institutional context, such as the project requirements, their grades, and other course work. Although intended to be authentic, the project felt contrived to the students, who saw it as merely a course assignment and not a “real” design project. Throughout the process, students made such comments as, “If it comes to a real project, I’d talk to the company and be like ‘Yeah, this isn’t safe,’ but this is a weed-out class design project.”
In their group interviews, students commented on the institutional and organizational factors that had shaped their approach to the design project. The relative importance of courses often determined time spent on various activities. As one student said in a design meeting, “I’m trying to get this done so I can go back to studying for physics.” Grades were a big concern because they determined admission into their engineering major of choice. The final report guidelines, intended to keep students on schedule, led them to fabricate items post hoc, and they often reported inaccurate timelines or results. Students also negotiated the small budget by falsifying project material costs. Justifications for making up elements of the reports were common. Consider this team member’s excuse: “Yeah, [student X] said don’t even worry about this thing, just throw it together, and go with it. He lives right next door to me in the dorm. But he’s a second-year, and he did this.” Or this: “All right, let’s make it up. It’s like one to two paragraphs.”
Overall, our study highlights the difficulty of making projects more authentic when done within a curricular setting. In such cases, student practices do not reflect the intended learning outcomes.
We recommend that educators utilize features of the institutional and organizational contexts to facilitate and enhance students’ design practices. Furthermore, it is important to align and integrate the project with material from other courses, so that the project does not feel like a separate entity. Educators should create a project timeline that facilitates student time management but also allows for flexibility within and across design phases; promote an iterative approach to design by allowing students to make changes and redesign throughout the process; and align project requirements with the intended learning outcomes. Further research may demonstrate additional ways in which educational contexts influence student practices and learning.
Andrea M. Goncher is a postdoctoral research fellow at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Aditya Johri, co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research, is an associate professor and chair of the information sciences and technology department at George Mason University’s Volgenau School of Engineering, where he directs the Engineering Education & Cyberlearning Laboratory. This article is based on “Contextual Constraining of Student Design Practices” in the July 2015 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education. The work was partially supported by NSF awards ITR-0757540 and EEC-142444.