2021 Virtual Undergraduate Research Symposium
2021 Virtual Undergraduate Research Symposium
Is GPA Linked To The Development of Design Thinking?
Is GPA Linked To The Development of Design Thinking?
1ST PLACE ORAL TALK
PROJECT NUMBER: 46 | AUTHOR: Colin Siles, Computer Science; Amanda Blickensderfer, Mechanical Engineering; Naya Winkelstein, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
MENTORS: Tyrone Vincent, Electrical Engineering; Megan Sanders, Trefny Center; Vibhuti Dave, Computer Science
ABSTRACT
Design thinking taught through capstone courses like SEED Lab have been linked to better engineering performance in the workplace. GPA has also been shown to have an effect on students’ class performance throughout their studies. This study specifically takes a look at how capstone design and GPA are linked. Students were asked to write a short response on how they would approach the design of a project that was similar to a typical project in a Senior Design class. The design process was separated into five distinct skills; research, prototyping, experimentation and planning for technical failure. Each paper was scored on a scale from 0-3 a higher score meant a better understanding of the skill. A gain-based model, the most appropriate model to analyze our data, does not provide evidence of a correlation between GPA and improvement in total score. These results suggest that GPA does not impact one’s ability to learn design skills. A correlation between GPA and pre score suggests students will enter capstone design courses with varying levels of initial design skills.
PRESENTATION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Colin is a second-year Computer Science major, with a focus in Data Science. This research project with the Trefny Center and Electrical Engineering department is his first, but prior experience as a TA made him interested in engineering education research. His research interests include creating and evaluating effective teaching methods, and more generally in the field of Machine Learning.
Amanda Blickensderfer is a sophomore in mechanical engineering. She does research on SEED lab and the design process with the electrical engineering department. Amanda would like to continue exploring SEED lab to continue to expand her understanding on research processes.
Naya Winkelstein is a sophomore in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. She works in the Electrical Engineering Department as a researcher for SEED Lab. The research conducted related to SEED Lab covers how GPA links to design thinking taught in SEED Lab. This research has required her to code responses as well as help run a regression analysis. Naya would like to continue her work with SEED Lab and explore some other areas of research as well.
Excellent work folks! Great to see this work being done in the electrical engineering department. How would you go about studying the unmeasured factor(s) responsible the positive correlation in your multiple regression analysis? What follow-up studies do you have in mind to study finer grain predictors of success in responding to a design scenario prompt, e.g. how does prior student work and research experience contribute to planning for technical and research?
Thanks Nick, that’s a great point! In the future, we might measure some other variables that might be related to GPA or SEED Lab scores, like internships, performance in other classes like prereqs (like Rachel mentioned below), and maybe exposure to this sort of content in high school. Motivation could also cause students to have a higher GPA and cause them to also have stronger design skills.
I think this is an extremely important lesson to give incoming Mines students! I was wondering if your data was affected by high or low data shifts? As in, if you exclude a GPA group of above 3.8, for example, does the data correlate better? Just curious.
Thanks for the talk!
Great question, Hope! We took another look at our data, and we do not observe any clear patterns between GPA and total score improvement. GPA at any level does not appear to have an effect of the development of design skills. Looking at patterns for other groups of students, such as gender, would be an interesting area for further research, though!
Great work group! I am an electrical engineering student who has taken SEED Lab and I’m about to finish my senior design capstone course as well. It is great to see how that design response assignment was used to conduct research on this topic. Have you considered offering this assignment to EE students in an earlier course to compare the results over a larger time frame? My design skills definitely improved over the course of SEED Lab and have helped me as a lead for my project in senior design. I have a strong GPA (>3.8), which has been a result of my high motivation to succeed as an individual student and member of a team. However, I would say that my design skills improved after taking EENG383 (Microcomputers) as well, which is a requirement for SEED Lab. I think it would be interesting to see how GPA affects EE students and the design thought process over the course of all these classes. Both EENG383 and SEED Lab require a lot of time and effort as a team of students that the EE students do not experience in many other classes up until that point (but may experience in classes after).
That’s a great question Rachel! Similar to Nick, we think that looking into these different factors is a great area for the future. Looking at how other teamwork based classes affect SEED Lab would be another interesting area and vice versa . In our larger general study students did improve in collaboration skills overall. So this is another area we could look at!
Great work on this project! I think the information you’ve gathered in this project is important for the future of design education! Out of curiosity, what was the motivating factor for this project? What suggested that there might be a link between GPA and how well the student learns design principles?
Hey Colter, thanks for your comment. The thing that motivated our project were studies in previous research that demonstrated a link between GPA and performance in engineering courses. For SEED lab we thought that GPA would be a good proxy for technical skills so we could determine if technical skills are necessary to learn design skills or if they could be learned separately.