TEACHING ENGINEERING DESIGN - CAN READING A TEXTBOOK MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Teaching design is an integral part of most engineering curricula. Oft en, students are introduced to the engineering design process through a chapter in a textbook. Does this passive approach to teaching an act ive process aid the students' learning? An experiment was conducted to assess what students learn about the design process when they read a text. Here, 10 students enrolled in a freshman course were asked to re ad aloud from a freshmen engineering textbook. Half of the subjects re ad the text prior to solving three open-ended engineering design probl ems and the other half solved the same problems before they read the t ext. Both the subjects' process in solving the problems, as well as th e quality of their solutions (the product), are assessed. Results show that subjects that read the text before they solved the three problem s spent significantly more time solving the problems and were more sop histicated in their problem solving strategies. These subjects also sc ored better when judged on the quality of their approach to the proble m (including the number of design criteria considered, communications, assumptions, and technical accuracy). However, these subjects did not score better on a quality measure of the final solution.