Keywords: undergraduate, design, life cycle, context
Considering Life Cycle During Design: A Longitudinal Study of Engineering Undergraduates
In this age of global warming and diminishing fossil fuel stores, society is becoming increasingly aware that
seemingly small decisions can have surprisingly far-reaching implications on the environment and future generations.
Accordingly, today’s engineers must approach design problems with a holistic, broad view of the impacts, environmental
and otherwise, of their solutions.
The notion of life cycle provides a structured, comprehensive approach for assessing the impact of an engineering
solution, whether it takes the form of a product, a service, or a process. Many engineers have long valued life
cycle analysis as an important tool in the design process, and life cycle is discussed in the literature of numerous
engineering disciplines.
Using the life cycle framing (see full paper for a complete discussion), the present analysis examines the degree
to which engineering students consider design problems in a temporal context, i.e., considering the full life span
of the design artifact, from conceptualization to disposal.
| This study…highlights the utility of life cycle as a framework for assessing and facilitating the
development of student ability to approach design with a broader perspective.
|
Implications of Findings
The findings from this study provide a baseline assessment of how broadly engineering undergraduates approach design
with respect to life cycle considerations. Our assessment suggests that there is a great deal of room for improvement
in this regard, justifying the increasing interest in courses and curricula concerning life cycle and other
sustainability-related topics for all engineering students. This study also highlights the utility of life cycle
as a framework for assessing and facilitating the development of student ability to approach design with a broader
perspective. In particular, the use of life cycle in assessment shows promise in research like ours and is likely
to be equally applicable to formative goals in design courses and curricula.
Methods and Background
To date, most of the engineering education literature’s treatment of life cycle has been limited to discussion of
innovative exercises and courses. In particular, there has been little examination of how much engineering students
consider life cycle during design or of rigorous approaches for assessing students in this regard. To help address
this gap in the literature, this paper reports on empirical research on undergraduate engineering students’ design
processes as assessed from a life cycle perspective. The study design, coupled with oversampling of women, provided
a unique opportunity to address the following research questions:
RQ1. How broadly do engineering undergraduates consider life cycle when evaluating
design alternatives?
RQ2. How are gender and class standing related to the breadth of life cycle consideration?
Data for this paper were collected as part of the Academic Pathways Study (APS), a multi-institution, multi-method,
longitudinal research study. APS was the main activity of the NSF-funded Center for the Advancement of Engineering
Education and focused on students’ experiences as they move into, through, and beyond their undergraduate engineering
educations. Data collection for this study occurred during a four-year period at four U.S. institutions.
In their original form, data analyzed for this paper were drawn from a set of handwritten responses to an engineering
design task. In the task, participants were asked to design a method to allow pedestrians to cross a street at a
busy intersection. Specifically, they were given 15 minutes to respond to a sequence of four open-ended questions
about the problem and their design solution. This street crossing design task was administered to the APS participants
twice – once in their second year of engineering study, and once in their fourth year. The data set consists of
131 responses collected from self-identified engineering majors in Year 2 and 61 responses collected in Year 4.
Of the latter 61 responses, 59 were from repeat participants, i.e., matched pairs of longitudinal data from students
who completed the task in both their second and fourth years and were still enrolled as engineering majors in Year 4.
For a detailed discussion of data collection and analysis methods, please see the full paper at the link below.
What We Found
Overall, findings for RQ1 indicate that the majority of the engineering students in the longitudinal sample did not
consider the life cycle stage “design and construction” in their solution evaluation in either year. The proportion
of those who considered the life cycle stage “maintenance and disposal” was even smaller in both years, in spite of the
fact that in the street crossing task (as with many engineering design problems), maintenance typically represents the
longest period in a solution’s life cycle.
Two main findings emerged from the RQ2 analyses. First, the full sample (131 students) of responses available in Year 2
indicated that women were more likely than men to consider “design and construction” in evaluating solutions. Although
the smaller size of the longitudinal sample (59 students) limited the power of within-year gender comparison,
proportions and differences for the longitudinal subset of data were similar to those observed in the full Year 2
sample. This is consistent with our conjecture that the lack of statistically significant difference in the
longitudinal sample is due more to its size than to substantive differences between the 59 longitudinal participants
and the 72 for whom we have only Year 2 data. Second, analyses of Year 4 data indicated similar proportions of men
and women who considered “design and construction” in evaluating their solutions (both with the full and longitudinal
samples). Together, these two findings suggest that the gender gap for this aspect of life cycle consideration
narrows after the second year of undergraduate engineering study. Small sample sizes prohibit conclusive analyses
within gender, but this narrowing appears to be due to the men “catching up” with the women, whose consideration of
“design and construction” did not appear to change between Years 2 and 4. The street crossing design task is a
tremendously rich source of data, and this study represents only the first steps with one of many analytical lenses
we are applying.
Authors: Ken Yasuhara, Andrew Morozov, Deborah Kilgore, Cynthia Atman, Christine Loucks-Jaret
Source: Proceedings of the 2009 American Society for Engineering Education Conference
The full paper, including references, is available via ASEE proceedings search.
For a printable pdf of this research brief, click here.
Brief created April 2009
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