Engineering design factors: how broadly do students define problems?

The preparation of students for design problem solving is an important aspect of engineering education. While it may appear obvious that senior engineering students will be more adept at solving design problems than freshmen engineering students, this perceived progress should be measured and quantified. Analysis of the factors a student considers when approaching an engineering design problem will provide a means of measuring and quantifying the differences of the abilities of students. A study was conducted in which 93 engineering students (both freshmen and seniors) were asked to list the factors one would consider in solving a particular large scale engineering design problem. The responses of the students were videotaped and then transcribed. Two coding schemes were developed to categorize the statements that students made while discussing design factors, first by physical location of the topic of the factor, and secondly by the frame of reference in which the factor is mentioned. In this paper, the transcribed responses of 25 students are described and discussed within the framework of the two categorization schemes. The goal of this preliminary analysis was to validate the coding scheme that will be applied to the full data set.