A Longitudinal Exploration of Students’ Functional Modeling Abilities

Teaching function is often regarded as an important practice to foster systems thinking skills in engineering students. The specifics of how function encourages systems thinking habits and improves design abilities, however, are not well understood. An instrument and accompanying scoring rubrics referred to as ‘Funskill’ have been developed and validated throughout previous research in an effort to gauge students understanding of, and ability to apply functional thinking. In this research, longitudinal data was collected from eight undergraduate engineering students’ sophomore, junior, and senior year, and data were analyzed in order to observe how engineering students’ functional aptitude has progressed throughout a design-oriented undergraduate engineering curriculum with multiple points of exposure to functional thinking. Results show that students’ competency with function does not improve as they progress throughout their undergraduate career. That being said students did demonstrate some degree of systems thinking in this study, but the growth of those skills over time remains ambiguous as FunSkill and its’ corresponding scoring instruments were not explicitly generated to capture students’ systems aptitude. Results from FunSkill are discussed and observations regarding the development of students’ design competency as well as the success and limitations of Funskill are deliberated. This work is part of ongoing research that explores how various instructional tools impact engineering students’ systems thinking tendencies and design skills.