The engineering design log: A digital design journal facilitating learning and assessment (RTP)

Abstract

Students engaging in design and engineering processes are frequently encouraged to keep a notebook, journal, or log containing their drawings, reflections, decisions, and justifications. In the professional world, such a notebook is primarily for the benefit of the designer, to keep track of important ideas and data and to protect intellectual property. In engineering education, a notebook or other process documentation is often incorporated into instruction as a pedagogical tool and is used by teachers for assessment; the intent is to assess the student's solution process separately from their design artifacts. However, there is little agreement among curriculum developers and practitioners about how best to ensure that students keep a thorough enough document trail to allow teachers to follow and assess a student's design process. Even at the college level, design processes are typically assessed only through reports and presentations without a standardized format or rubric. While previous work in this area has focused on the development of a rubric for engineering design portfolios at the college level, there were no suggested portfolio formats, and the rubrics were not piloted specifically at the K-12 level. To help students and teachers in K-12 settings navigate and assess engineering design, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an electronic Engineering Design Process Log to guide the engineering design process, its documentation, and its assessment. This log, when coupled with supplemental reflections, can be used in conjunction with a newly adapted set of rubrics to assess student understanding and application of the Engineering Design Process (EDP) at the middle and high school levels. For students who are novices in following the EDP, such a log can also serve as a guide, providing cues about the necessary components and activities associated with each step in the process and encouraging students not to miss or fail to complete steps. There are two primary contributions in this paper. The first is to present a detailed description of the EDP log and rubrics for middle and high school classrooms, along with student data and artifacts. The rationale for the EDP log will be explained, including parallels to engineering design courses at Georgia Tech. The second contribution is a comparison of the EDP log with other engineering notebook paradigms. Qualitative data from both middle and high school teachers is provided to illustrate the use of different engineering notebook paradigms in classroom settings. Interview and focus group results are presented using thematic analysis, a process-oriented approach involving a systematic technique of identifying and coding themes.