Written feedback provided by first-year engineering students, undergraduate teaching assistants, and educators on design project work

Abstract

Feedback is an important part of design education. To better understand how feedback is provided to students on their engineering design work, we characterised and compared first-year engineering students', undergraduate teaching assistants', and educators' written feedback on sample student design work. We created a coding scheme including two domains: Substance and Focus of feedback. Educators made more and longer comments than undergraduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate teaching assistants made more and longer comments than first-year students. The first-year students focused on giving specific directions in their feedback while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants asked thought-provoking questions. Students tended to make more comments about the ways that their peers had communicated their design work while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants made more comments about the design ideas presented in the sample work. This study offers implications for practice for supporting educators, undergraduate teaching assistants, and firstyear engineering students to be able to provide feedback on design work. ARTICLE HISTORY

Representational Ecosystems in Architectural Design Studio Critiques - Do changes in the representational ecosystem affect tutors and students behaviors during design critiques?

“…The literature on tutors' type of feedback or strategies during studio critiques is rich (Adams et al 2016;Cardoso et al 2016;Cennamo & Brandt 2012;Dannels & Martin 2008;Goldschmidt et la. 2010;Heylighen et al 1999;Marbouti et al 2017;Schön 1985;Uluoglu 2000;Yilmaz & Daly 2016). Based on our literature review, we propose a classification of tutors' feedback types into four main categories : scaffolding implies reasoning, questioning and reflecting on a design issue, explaining / instructing illustrates a descriptive and explicit approach of discussing a design issue, demonstrating / proposing involves the formulation of new ideas, changes in the design and suggesting / exploring calls for experimentations and opening the design process (Table 1).…”