Addressing the Learning Needs of Minority Students in Engineering through Participatory Design

Abstract

Jianyu Dong is a professor in electrical and computer engineering at CSULA. Her area of expertise is video compression/communication, multimedia networks, QoS, etc. As the PI of the NSF CCLI Project entitled "Enhancing undergraduate computer networking curriculum using remote project-based learning," she works closely with colleagues from computer science to redesign the network curriculum to integrate project-based and inquiry-based learning.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Addressing the Learning Needs of Minority Students in Engineering through Participatory Design AbstractThis paper provides a holistic presentation of an interdisciplinary research project sponsored by NSF RIGEE (Research Initiative Grant in Engineering Education) program. Launched in 2013, this collaborative research studied the learning characteristics of minority students in a senior computer engineering course using Collaborative Project-based Learning (CPBL) pedagogy and leveraged the research findings to improve the instructional design using Participatory Design Approach to increase the success of underrepresented minority students. During the iterative implementation of the revised CPBL in 2014 and 2015, an embedded single-case study was conducted and multiple forms of data were collected to analyze the impact of the course redesign on (a) course related knowledge and skill outcomes, (b) domain-specific efficacy in relation to situated learning, and (c) student engagement (deep vs. surface learning) and team dynamics. In this paper, quantitative and qualitative data collected over the past three years was analyzed collectively, triangulated, and related to relevant research and theories. This process allowed us to work toward: (1) providing a more generalizable description of our overall findings, (2) gaining a greater understanding of the underlying classroom and course factors and their impact on the development of domain-specific efficacy among minority students, and (3) developing a set of guidelines to effectively incorporate participatory design based on the situated learning framework. The significance of the work presented in this paper highlights the need to accelerate current research on using participatory design as a means to empower minority students in engineering and technology related disciplines.

Practices in Engineering Education

“…In future work, we will have educators, students, and researchers working together to design solutions to the difficulty of creating inclusive practices and environments in engineering education. As a discipline, engineering education has used co-design to do curricular innovations on smaller scales [32] , and at times it has been conducted with educators and researchers, but not necessarily with the target students [33] . Co-designing with participants with different power relations requires that "in order for them [co-designers] to take on this role [of experts], they must be given appropriate tools for expressing themselves [34] ".…”