Work in progress — A comparison of mentoring functions in capstone courses across engineering disciplines

Characterizing capstone design teaching: A functional taxonomy

“…Procedural validation (fit between reality and the resulting taxonomy) is supported through the use of survey responses to guide interview prompts (i.e., triangulation) in conjunction with critical incident interviewing to elicit concrete accounts of practice as well as through the overall approach to data analysis (i.e., iterative coding of increasing subsets of the data to test and refine definitions, use of multiple coders to check author biases). In addition, though beyond the scope of this article, surveys of students of selected interview participants (Pembridge, ) and subsequent case studies combining observational data with student and faculty interviews (Lutz, Hixson, Paretti, Epstein, & Lesko, ; Lutz & Paretti, ) provide further support.…”

“…The following sections describe each function in detail as well as define and illustrate the associated practice subcodes. Because of the number of practices, we have included representative quotations in summary tables for brevity rather than integrating them into the text; a more expansive set of quotations for each practice is available in Pembridge (; because this paper describes an earlier version of the model, function and practice names differ slightly from those used here). To provide an audit trail, quotations are identified by participant ID number and transcript paragraph number (i.e., 71242/68 is participant number 71242, paragraph 68).…”

“…In exploring Question 2, the interviewer used an extensive series of prompts consistent with CDM (Pembridge, ) to capture how participants identified the problem, what their goals were, what actions they took, why, and to what extent the situation was typical for capstone teams. Pembridge conducted all interviews primarily by phone (39), with three in‐person interviews.…”

“…Given the prominence of “mentoring” as a term used to describe capstone teaching (particularly in the decennial national surveys by Todd et al, and Howe, ), we focused on mentoring models as viable starting points. After reviewing multiple models (Pembridge, ), we selected the one proposed by Kram () in part because of its prominence in the literature, but more importantly, given the role of capstone design in the transition from school to work, because of its use in both academic and workplace settings.…”

“…The coded segments were then exported to an Excel document, and we each reviewed all coded segments to further refine definitions for each function code and subcode. This initial version of the model was published in Pembridge (). The codebook was then given to a third researcher, who coded five interviews from the initial set of 25 for training and triangulation.…”