WIP: Perceptions of Agency in an Introductory Engineering Design Experience

This work-in-progress research paper outlines an exploratory study that investigates the agency of engineering students in the context of design-based learning experiences. Professional engineers engage in various decision-making activities when tasked with the design of a product, system, or service. Such decisions are either informed by constraints placed by stakeholders or are a consequence of trade-offs between multiple criteria in the design process. In both scenarios, engineers have to exercise agency in how they approach information seeking, goal-setting, solution generation, prototyping and testing. This requires them to be comfortable both with being given agency, and in utilizing it to their advantage for effective problem-solving. Therefore, it is important to expose students to learning environments where they have opportunities to make choices and evaluate those choices in the context of problem solving. There is also literature to suggest that opportunities for exercising agency in educational contexts improve learning, engagement, and develop skills of critical thinking and innovative problem-solving. Such opportunities are created through learning activities with different levels of scaffolding, open-endedness, and course integration - from the use of open-ended modeling projects within specific content areas, to entire design courses that invite students to exercise agency at all steps of their design process. Though agency has been studied before in these contexts, there is a dearth of studies that examine how such opportunities to practice agency impact students during their engagement with engineering design. This study aims to begin addressing this gap by exploring the research question: How do first-year students experience agency in an introductory design project? The study uses data from the first-year course sequence of an engineering program offered at large, Midwestern, public university. Students from all engineering disciplines enroll in this course and complete multiple design-related problems and projects in a team-based learning setting. This paper will present the initial results of an inductive analysis of 3 semi-structured interviews conducted with the students, capturing their own perceptions regarding their ability to make decisions throughout the project and examining the structures that encouraged or inhibited them in exercising agency. This research has implications for engineering instructors related to the design of learning environments that foster agency and the role that scaffolding plays in forming agentic student behaviors. Future work will expand our study of student perceptions of agency to include other mediating factors such as self-efficacy, motivation, and constraints on their learning experience.