Educating effective engineering designers: The role of reflective practice

Educating effective engineering designers is an important goal of engineering programs. Efforts to explore the extent to which this goal is being met hinge on our ability to characterize what contributes to effectiveness and to map students' performance against such standards. In our previous work, we have used verbal protocol analysis to characterize the design processes of over 100 engineering students. We have analysed (a) differences in the design processes of freshman and seniors, (b) the effects of interventions on student design processes, and (c) the process factors that contribute to quality. In this paper, we seek to demonstrate how Schon's reflective practitioner theory may be used to provide another understanding of verbal protocol analysis research results. In particular, we discuss our empirical results on student processes in the context of educating reflective practitioners. Such an approach may provide suggestions for enhancing engineering education.