Factors of Group Design Decision Making

Design is a decision-making process. Designers make decisions between alternative solutions,decisions about feasibility of individual solutions, decisions about narrowing or broadening the problem scope. They also make logistical decision about when teams will meet, how decisions will be made. Recent analysis of high school student design activities revealed that groups and individuals are not spending much time on decision processes and it can be assumed that the faculties of beginning college students are in a similar vein. In the past year changes were made to a freshman level design thinking course to improve student approaches to decision making.Accompanying these changes, the instructors, as researchers, have attempted to understand student decision processes in order to improve instruction.This paper will discuss the development of an instrument to help evaluate student decision priorities. Understanding and measuring the decision processes among group decisions poses challenges. Based on an initial review of the literature, an instrument to measure group design decisions was not identified. Literature was reviewed to identify elements of effective design decisions as well as useable items from existing instruments. Literature on effective strategies for decision-making in related fields of study. The survey instrument developed included 16 questions about decision processes that related to four proposed latent constructs. Prior to administration of the instrument, a team of teacher educators and educational researchers provided feedback on content validity. The survey was administered to 218 students following reflection on a group design project at the end of the semester.Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), several results are elucidated. By focusing only on questions in the survey relevant to decision processes, a nascent model was formed with 13 indicators loading on three factors (6, 4, and 4 questions respectively, with one item weakly cross-loading). The model explains 61.814% of the variation in the items and each factor has strong internal consistency as measured by Cronbach’s alpha (α = .898, α = .877, and α = .80).The accompanying results also support a new survey instrument for understanding sources of design decision processes revolving around the three factors: processing data, considering alternatives, and understanding decisions.The model is currently undergoing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a 670 student sample,which will be completed in December 2014. The CFA process may confirm the suggested model as well as evaluate its validity through convergence and discrimination with appropriate metrics of group behavior. Once confirmed, this model could be used in other environments to gauge the ubiquity of these constructs. Regardless of these results however, these findings provide focus areas for subsequent instructional design based on student perceptions of group decision-making processes

Analyzing an Abbreviated Dynamics Concept Inventory and Its Role as an Instrument for Assessing Emergent Learning Pedagogies

The Dynamics Concept Inventory (DCI) is a validated assessment tool commonly used to evaluate student growth within core, gateway-level mechanics courses. This research explored the evaluative use of this tool within the context of Freeform – an emergent course system that buttresses active class meetings with blended and collaborative virtual learning environments, themselves founded upon extensive multimedia content and interactive forums – at Purdue University. The paper specifically considers a number of related issues including: (i) the thoughtful development (via expert content validation) and statistical reliability of an abbreviated DCI instrument, which is more amenable to in-class implementation than the much longer full DCI; (ii) the correlation of abbreviated-DCI performance with exam scores and final course grades for a dynamics course using the Freeform framework with an emphasis on both conceptual understanding and traditional problem-solving skills; and (iii) various inter-section performance metrics in a preliminary study on how an implementation of the abbreviated-DCI may help elucidate the impact of the instructor within the Freeform framework. The results of these analyses supported the validity and reliability of the abbreviated DCI tool, and demonstrated its usefulness in a formal research setting. The preliminary study suggested that the Freeform framework might normalize differences in instructor pedagogical choices and student performance across class sections. These findings indicate that the abbreviated DCI holds promise as a research instrument and lay the groundwork for future inquiry into the impact of the Freeform instructional framework on students and instructors alike