Integrating cooperative learning principles into the engineering design process: A mixed-methods study at first-year undergraduate engineering

This work-in-progress research paper aims to integrate cooperative learning principles into the engineering design process. The context of the study is an interdisciplinary, design-experiences course at first-year undergraduate engineering in India. Under the Indian schooling systems, the incoming first-year engineering students do not have any prior practice in intensive and protracted problem-solving and team-based experiences. Thus, when these students encounter their first design-experiences course, we cannot assume that the students will be able to self-organize their learning, apply new knowledge to the problem-solving contexts and effectively function in teams while meeting the outcomes of design problem-solving. The proposed study investigates the research question: How does integrating cooperative learning principles during engineering design phases impact the problem solver's knowledge of teamwork and taskwork, team effectiveness and team performance? The objective of the proposed work is to integrate Cooperative learning principles during the initial tasks of problem-definition and information gathering and investigate its impact on students in terms of their teamwork knowledge, taskwork knowledge, team effectiveness and team performance. The study follows a quasi-experimental research design with an embedded qualitative strand. The core design of Convergent parallel design is embedded in experimental research design. The detailed methodology is described in this work.