An evaluation of the effect of library instruction as an external guided research experience on product design team performance

This work discusses the details of an analysis regarding the potential effects of several independent variables on the performance of design project teams, with a special effort towards explaining the relative importance of "library instruction," as a guided research experience, on engineering design education. Although both the literature and a preliminary study suggest that library instruction can make a difference in the performance of engineering design teams, the results of our study do not support this idea. Thus, having results, which do not align with the dominant belief about the effectiveness of library instruction, we conclude that shortcomings of the study design might have played an important role. Techniques to refine the research design and possible factors that contributed to the statistical insignificance are discussed in this paper. The suggestions for further research include: (1) using a larger sampling, (2) revision of measurement criteria and/or instruments, and (3) inclusion of other variables that were not included in the original regression model.