A Two-Dimensional Typology for Characterizing Student Peer and Instructor Feedback in Capstone Design Project Courses

This work in progress describes a study that is being conducted in a management engineering capstone design series of courses at a large Canadian university. The courses utilize a design review format that leverages feedback from both the course instructor (design expert) and student peers (design novices) in an informal face-to-face format. Prior research studying the efficacy of peer and expert feedback has found that expert comments and suggestions are often not well-understood or utilized by novices. Thus, in some domains, students have been shown to benefit more from feedback from multiple peers than a single expert. While the importance of peer review in the engineering and architecture disciplines has been established, there is little prior research on the quantity, content, type, and impact of feedback provided by novices, as compared to experts, in the context of engineering design. The objective of this qualitative research study is to formally characterize, compare and contrast expert and novice feedback in engineering design review meetings. Preliminary observations have suggested that the addition of novice questions and feedback to the design review meetings enhances the quality and quantity of formative assessments. This study uses more robust data collection methods and analysis to refine and validate our initial findings. We video recorded and are in the process of transcribing 28 hours of review meetings of 14 capstone design teams that occurred in 2015. A minority of the meetings utilized instructor-review only, whereas the rest incorporated both student and instructor review. Using a grounded theory framework, the video transcripts will be coded and analyzed to better understand the differences in feedback provided by experts and novices. A literature review on the potential differences that may arise due to experience in the design process leads us to propose a new two dimensional typology of feedback that captures both its content the design stage/activity being addressed – as well as the form the feedback takes. A portion of the already-transcribed review meetings are used to illustrate feedback comments of various permutations of content and form arising from instructor and student reviewers. In future work, the chosen typology will be utilized, and likely further refined, to analyze the complete transcribed data. The overall study aims to contribute to our understanding of the effectiveness of face-to-face peer-review in engineering design education.