COMMUNICATION AS A PROXY MEASURE FOR STUDENT 'DESIGN ABILITY' IN CAPSTONE DESIGN COURSES

摘要

Many engineering departments use capstone design courses in the undergraduate program in which students design, build, and test a complex project. These programs are increasingly industry sponsored, and expose students to many of the real constraints engineers face. Capstone courses are the primary mechanism used by many universities for integrating communication, and teamwork skills and social, economic, and ethical issues into the engineering curriculum. The capstone concept has been extended by other schools such as the Design Practice program at Northern Arizona University and the projects program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in which dedicated design courses are integrated into all four years of the undergraduate curriculum. Improvements in student performance following capstone programs have been observed in several studies, and capstone experiences are reported positively by graduates. Capstone courses tend to focus on projects which are specific and unique, and many programs use capstone courses to cover multiple ABET outcomes that are not fully addressed elsewhere in the curriculum. As a result, there is no widely accepted model or textbook on which capstone courses are based. The uniqueness of capstone courses, breadth of material covered, and the lack of a way to accurately to measure "design ability" makes it difficult to assess learning outcomes. A national survey indicates that most capstone courses outcomes are broad, poorly defined, or the outcomes may vary between projects within a course. The difficulty of assessing outcomes for individual students is increased since most capstone courses are team-based and students may have very different roles or even be in different departments.