Tracking Skills Development and Self-efficacy in a New First-year Engineering Design Course

This evidence-based practice paper describes the development and implementation of surveys and a focus group to understand the impact of a new first-year engineering design course. With the intent of adding a practical design experience for first-year students, the Engineering Design and Communication course was introduced as a pilot program in the fall of 2017 at Duke University. Over the course of a semester, students work in teams to learn and apply the engineering design process to a client-based problem drawn from a community partner. In the course, the students should learn to 1) apply the engineering design process to meet the needs of a client; 2) iteratively prototype a solution using appropriate tools and materials; 3) work collaboratively on a team; and 4) communicate the critical steps in the design process in written, oral, and visual formats. The course was created following many best practices in first-year engineering education. This paper focuses specifically on how the course contributes to students’ confidence about themselves as engineers, students’ understanding of the engineering design process, and students’ progress in technical skills. The paper also assesses students’ satisfaction with the course. This information is designed to help leaders in the engineering school comprehend the specific impact of the first-year design course, in addition to laying the foundation for a long-term retention study. There are two parts of this study: online surveys and a focus group. The participants for the surveys included subsets of the 48 freshmen students in the course. To conduct this data collection, three surveys were administered to generate paired data used to investigate trends over time. To generate qualitative data and gain insight into what might be underlying the results of the surveys, a focus group session was conducted. Statistical analyses, including two-sample t-tests, paired t-tests, and chi-squared tests, were conducted with the survey data to determine significance of changes over time. Qualitative data from the open-ended questions was evaluated by frequency of response. Major findings from this study include: students definitively progressed in crafting, CAD, and rapid prototyping over the course of the semester; participants’ confidence in each step of the engineering design process increased; and the course was successful in providing students with real-world experiences that positively contributed to their engineering self-efficacy. Self-efficacy in Engineering Nationwide, university administrators, faculty members, industries, and organizations are striving to increase retention within engineering. When considering first-to-second-year retention rates for engineering degrees, the American Society for Engineering Education investigated trends from 2003 to 2012 and found an overall increase in retention rates, but rates remained below 80% on average [1]. Previous literature has investigated the role of a student’s self confidence in engineering in terms of year-to-year retention at the university level. Researchers have discovered that only a minor portion of engineering students (as low as 8.5%) leave due to academic difficulty [2, 3, 4]. By restructuring programs to focus on first-year retention, many institutions observed positive retention results [5, 6]. After introducing a first-year engineering projects course at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Knight et al. found that students who took the course demonstrated increased retention when compared with their peers who did not take the course [3]. When Knight et al. discussed possible explanations for this increased retention, they attributed it to “the impact of active hands-on pedagogy, creation of student learning communities, an early experience on the human side of engineering, self-directed acquisition of knowledge by students, instructor mentoring, and the success orientation of the course” [3]. It has been shown that if students have a strong, positive conviction about their knowledge in engineering, then they are more likely to succeed academically in the specific subject, as well as in engineering-related subjects [7]. Aleta also stated that the engineering design experience was found to be the main indicator of academic achievements in both math and related engineering subjects [7]. Self-efficacy is defined as one’s belief in one’s ability to achieve a specific task or succeed in a particular area by achieving the intended results [8]. For students, this may dictate their academic execution from a cognitive aspect, as their personal efficacy can positively influence their outlook on performance and potential to succeed. Bandura illustrates the importance of academic self-efficacy by asserting that “students’ beliefs in their efficacy to regulate their own learning and to master academic activities determine their aspirations, level of motivation, and academic accomplishments” [8]. In the context of engineering, this is essential as students navigate technically challenging coursework and rigorous workloads. Self-efficacy has a strong relationship to both learning and achievements. As Mamaril et al. state, it is most effective to measure selfefficacy at both the general engineering field level and the specific technical skill level [9]. Evaluating at these different levels yields a more comprehensive understanding of a student’s confidence in their overall engineering abilities. A major contributor to a student’s self confidence in completing engineering tasks is their perceived proficiency in technical skills. Usher et al. investigated students in undergraduate engineering and determined that experiences that specifically enact a student’s increased sense of capabilities were vital to their self-efficacy [10]. In another study, the author examined a senior engineering project that utilized the design process and discovered a positive trend of increased self-efficacy over time [11]. The resulting conclusions noted that there is a time-dependency, thus possibly an experience-dependence for these advances. This is potentially indicative of selfefficacy gains specifically from successful experiences. The study also denotes self-efficacy and teamwork skills as critical elements of a successful engineering career [11]. Literature has highlighted the importance of not only teaching technical skills, but allowing students to apply them in a hands-on manner in the framework of an engineering project to constructively impact their personal efficacy. Morocz et al. presented evidence revealing a relationship between students’ levels of participation in makerspaces during their first year and their confidence in completing engineering design tasks [6]. The real-time application of learned skills provided students with an outlet to see their coursework come to fruition, producing a positive impact on their engineering self-efficacy. First-Year Design Courses Multiple institutions have implemented novel first-year design courses to engage students in hands-on experiences. While some focus on a series of short projects, some on design and exposure to a programming language such as MATLAB, and a few on full-semester, client-based design projects, all seek to increase retention and improve understanding of engineering concepts at an early stage. Below, a few of many quality program are described; these were selected because they highlight and assess topics of interest to our program, including creativity, real-world design challenges, and development of technical skills and self-confidence. With the intention of exhibiting that engineering is a creative process and increasing interest in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), The University of Alabama developed a design laboratory freshmen course for ECE students [12]. In this course, the creative process for the students’ designs included brainstorming, planning, and implementing design solutions. The authors found that students who participated in the creative lab demonstrated a higher confidence in continuing in engineering coursework than those who did not. As the study states, “Creativity is an important attribute for engineers practicing their profession in a global society” [12]. Although students struggled with the open-ended nature of the design problems, they enjoyed the course and saw the value in the addition to their curriculum. Illustrating the importance of incorporating real-world engineering design problems, Odeh et al. write, “Nowadays, engineering education needs to meet the requirements and needs of business and industry. This can be achieved by collaborating with the local industry to adopt real life engineering design problems” [13]. In this study, a first-year innovative engineering design course is offered to students of various engineering disciplines and includes design problems that facilitate application of basic engineering concepts to real-world problems [13]. They found that student satisfaction with the course was high (88%) and that placing them in projects based on their discipline improved their perception of engineering while granting them the opportunity to work in teams similar to those experienced in industry. Students were also more confident in choosing their final major as they were able to acquire a better understanding of each engineering major. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics offered a first-year design course centered around real-world engineering experience through a hands-on vehicle design project [14]. The students found the experience empowering, and surveys showed they were much more comfortable tackling technical problems without clear answers. The students’ comfort with technical skills and attitude towards teamwork also improved over the course of the semester. The outcomes of these studies are vital when exploring the concept of engineering selfefficacy. Carb