Reflection in Engineering Design: Student Perceptions on Usefulness

Reflection in engineering design promotes the development of personal and professional skills, helping students to document the steps they took, examine the outcomes, and looking ahead to the following weeks.This reflective practice contributes to adopting a growth mindset and becoming life-long learners.In a study of 1,278 reflections of 83 second-year engineering students over two years, this paper is an exploratory examination of the act of reflecting in a twosemester engineering design course.Reviewing an end-of-year survey on the act of reflecting as well as the reflections themselves, this study presents student perceptions of reflections and whether the reflections changed throughout the design process.We found that 55% of participants describe reflections as useful, and 78% of participants describe the reflections as impacting their design project, team dynamics, or personal development.Seven themes are documented about student perceptions of reflections, including: expansive thinking, examining the project more deeply, team dynamics, goal-setting, looking back at progress, planning next steps, and functional critiques.We also found that the number of words for each reflection changes with the design process.