Work in Progress: Qualitative Differences in Learning Processes and Skill Development Across Engineering Capstone Teams

This work in progress paper presents a study that follows four engineering capstone teams over the course of their two-year projects. Students on four different teams collected ethnographic and autoethnographic data in the form of field notes to explore how students learn across a variety of projects that vary in their scope, type, and team composition. This paper aims to explain the impacts that role rigidity and project management style have on the design process and discuss the factors that influence the types of learning occurring in capstone teams. Data suggest that project scope, role rigidity, and the level of ambiguity in the project impact the learning processes employed by different teams, and the skills that team members developed.