The Interplay of First-Year Engineering Students' Engineering Design Reasoning and Quality of the Sources for Problem Framing.

A fundamental practice in engineering design practices is information gathering to help engineers understand and solve problems. This practice is especially important in the early stage of problem framing to make sure engineers work on the right problem. In the context of engineering education, while engaging in information gathering, it is common to see that information gathered by students is generally based on convenient access, which mostly returns superficial information. Students' ability to gather information will impact not only how they frame a problem, but also how they reason and deal with the problem. Therefore, it is important for students to develop a strong ability to gather information and for educators to know how to help them develop these skills in the context of engineering education. In the past, studies explored students' information gathering process by evaluating information literacy skills in an engineering context. However, studies focusing on students' ability to find relevant information from high-quality sources and their relation to their reasoning are still not fully explored. In this study, we are interested in exploring the research question, “How do the quality of sources used by students and their engineering design reasoning interplay during problem framing?” This study was conducted in a first-year engineering course in the Spring of 2022. A total of 113 students were enrolled in the required fundamental engineering course. Data was collected using the Uncovering Design Reasoning in Problem Framing (UDR-F). Students worked on the questionnaire as a part of the problem-framing stage for two of the design projects in the course. The data used in this work-in-progress study was only the first part of the UDR-F questionnaire for 20 randomly selected students. Two coding books were designed to analyze students' engineering design reasoning and the quality of the sources they used. The first coding book was based on the design reasoning quadrants conceptual framework. The second coding book was based on two conceptual frameworks focused on evaluating the quality of sources by providing criteria for relevance and high-quality sources. Each questionnaire was analyzed to identify how the quality of sources interplays with their engineering design reasoning. The key contribution of this study's findings was to characterize the interplay of students' engineering design reasoning and the quality of sources students used to frame problems. Our findings will potentially shed light on the importance of information gathering processes in engineering design practices. These processes can potentially impact students' ability to reason even beyond problem framing stages in engineering design practices. Furthermore, instruments used to gather and analyze data in this study can further be adapted to different engineering scenarios for problem framing.