Toward reflective practice in engineering design education

Today engineering design practices are radically changing through the development of collaborative work, which requires new specific skills. From an educational point of view specific courses have been set up, including projects and teamwork. However, few efforts have been devoted to the definition of a framework for analysing and characterising collaborative practices in engineering design education. Our aim in this paper is to propose a framework, based on four basic concepts, which allows the characterisation of specific collaborative situations in order to provide engineering students with a more accurate feedback. We stress here the importance of developing reflective practices as a basic skill for collaboration. Our research method is based on a longstanding qualitative analysis of groups of students working on a design game at a graduate level.