Switching Midstream, Floundering Early, and Tolerance for Ambiguity: How Capstone Students Cope with Changing and Delayed Projects

Industry-sponsored projects are a staple of senior capstone design, and provide our advanced level students with valuable real-world experience. Because of the many players involved in an industrialsponsored project, there are occasionally changes of scope or project goal adjustments that may occur midstream; this can be frustrating to students, despite best practices in selecting and vetting all project sources. Similarly, there have been research-based as well as industry-based projects that have been slow to launch, taking an inordinate amount of time in the first of the two capstone terms to solidify the problem. Recently, a Capstone offering at Northeastern University had a higher than usual number of projects (46%) which experienced substantial changes in topic or scope after a significant amount of work had been completed by the students. Others (~16%) were slow to launch due to logistics in connecting and/or onboarding with project sponsors, and required extra time to sufficiently define and scope their projects. While this situation created concern for the students, it also generated an opportunity for the capstone course directors to study student tolerance for ambiguity in design as well as other factors associated with resultant success levels. Some student teams rose to the challenges and accomplished successful projects, while others realized poor outcomes in terms of implementation and completeness of their solutions. Students were surveyed at the end of the first term of the sequence (Capstone 1) to determine what they were most proud of, what was surprising about Capstone, and they were also asked other questions designed to explore their attitudes and approaches toward the course and its content. Textual content analysis was used to determine major themes and reveal patterns that correlated with final project outcomes in Capstone 2. There was no statistical difference between prototype/success scores for teams who changed topics or launched later and those who did not at the = .05 level. However, some clear differentiators did emerge. Teams whose topics changed or lagged and had high prototype scores reported being proud of their team flexibility, their project and time management abilities, and their positivity and preparedness. Teams whose topics changed or lagged and had low prototype scores were primarily proud of finishing the project, and reaching the finish line without reference to the quality of the outcome or personal growth. Looking back to the end of Capstone 1, low-scoring/low success teams were also surprised by the difficulty of the work, the vague nature of the problems, and the time investment, while those who earned high scores/had high success reported being pleasantly surprised by the amount of freedom and time they had to scope the problem and develop a solution. Developing early strategies for students to see open-ended and vaguely-scoped problems as an opportunity and a benefit, rather than a difficulty and a struggle, can accomplish several things: It can (a) help students whose projects have had major roadblocks to succeed; (b) provide perspective for faculty to reinforce the value of Capstone Design as a personal development opportunity; (c) offer opportunities for coordinators and advisors to explicitly outline the nature of the “capstone experience” thus distinguishing it from a standard course – before Capstone, at the beginning, and during the capstone experience; (d) lead to improved outcomes for other industrial-sponsored and research-based projects; (e) inform curricular modifications in order to prepare engineers earlier in the undergraduate experience through more exposure to open-ended problems in their courses prior to Capstone. Introduction Engineering capstone design courses have been extensively studied due to their unique ability to teach integration of engineering principles as well as professional soft skills. Students are provided a chance to prepare themselves for practicing real-world engineering design prior to entering the workplace while simultaneously learning project management, resiliency, and teamwork skills [1]. We have observed great engineering students become disillusioned quickly with the capstone process when they encounter customary levels of uncertainty in their projects. We have students who have, up until the onset of capstone in their senior year, encountered mostly non-open-ended problems, with predominantly predefined, closed-form solution sets. Even more challenging for the industrial engineering population is that they tend to crave order, processes, lists, and procedures, either by self-selection into the major or through inculcation. Once they arrive at capstone, they are commissioned to solve problems that don’t have an explicit algorithm, list, or established process to solve them. Due to the real-world nature of senior capstone, in effect the students receive a blank sheet of paper, hearing “go figure out what the problem is –and solve it”. In addition to this, there are some sponsors who may not respond very quickly, or change their minds, or receive the initial data and then want more. Figuratively, in many cases, a team has a blank sheet of paper and it feels like it is being pulled away from them every time they work to get the page half full. Some groups manage this well. They take the information they gathered from the first problem they received, and either adapt it or change it to fit the new problem. Others blame the course, the sponsor, and/or the advisor and feel that change is an injustice. Capstone Experience vs. Standard Coursework. Most standard university courses have a planned path, especially in engineering. If they are well organized, the student experiences are progressive, rich and varied, with a strategy for periodic qualitative and quantitative feedback. Many problem sets have solutions – or feasible ranges; programs and projects have foreseeable outcomes, and even the stochastic and simulated models can be objectively evaluated. The capstone experience by design commissions advanced students to tackle open-ended complex problems, which tend to shift for a variety of reasons. Yet capstone is designated as a ‘course’ in the academic model; typically courses have one set path. If the path changes, that feels unfair somehow and at times this creates a sense of disequilibrium at best, and extreme frustration in some cases. The question stands: How can we best prepare students to manage the challenges that necessarily accompany capstone? This is critical, especially when the circumstances are more dramatic in the cases of late starters and those who have projects that switch focus midstream. Background Research Tolerance for Ambiguity and Uncertainty. The skill our students may need to develop or cultivate is tolerance for ambiguity [2]. Mohammed et al. studied tolerance for ambiguity and its effect on student design performance [3]. They were focused on first-year programs in particular, but the observations are applicable to capstone design as well. Industry-sponsored design projects are particularly valued because they are real-world, complex, challenging, and motivate students to use teamwork and learn project management and other industrial practices [4]. However, students may have a negative view of industrial projects when they are too open-ended, particularly if they have had little practice in open-ended projects. Mohammed et al. found that students with a higher tolerance for ambiguity show higher levels of collective efficacy, team satisfaction, and conflict resolution than students who have a low tolerance for ambiguity [3]. They found that not only did ambiguity tolerant students perform better on open-ended projects; they tended to react somewhat negatively to straightforward, guided projects. These students did not just tolerate ambiguity – they preferred and sought it. Hsu and Cardella looked specifically at how industrial engineering capstone students dealt with uncertainty in their designs [5]. This study only looked at one team of 5 students. However, they found that these students tended to use mathematical thinking while they dealt with uncertainty in their designs. In other words, they used some of the same strategies used in math classes, specifically previously established problem-solving strategies and social resources (other students, advisors, tutors) and material resources (textbooks, reference sources, computers). Successful designers using mathematical thinking separated problems into subproblems, transformed complex problems into simpler problems in the face of uncertainty, and less frequently, used a relatively systematic guess-and-check strategy to narrow down possibilities. Although mathematical thinking can be used as a way of getting students to think more positively about design uncertainty, it may depend on how they were taught mathematics, and their ability to transfer the closed-ended skills used on a typical math problem to an open-ended problem. The Reflective Practitioner. A study by Valkenberg and Dorst discussed the use of descriptive and reflective practices in design [6]. This paper drew heavily on Schön’s paradigm of reflective practice [7]. Schön contends that every design problem is necessarily a unique challenge. Teaching students the skills to reflect on their design while innovating, in order to advance the design, is essential to teaching design. This also can lead to problems, since if every problem is unique, and the students want a single concrete roadmap for how a project should go, there is bound to be conflict. Valkenberg and Dorst discussed four different design activities: naming, framing, moving, and reflecting [6]. These terms were used to describe the activities performed by student designers, in an effort to quantify how much time various teams spent on each activity and relate that effort to team outcomes. Naming includes low-level ta