First-Year students´ understanding of direct user in open-ended problem solving activities

This paper presents an investigation into First-Year Engineering (FYE) students´ ability to identify the direct user in open-ended client-driven problem solving activities. To guide FYE students in formulating an open-ended problem, students are asked a series of questions about the stakeholders, the direct user of the solution, and its needs. The purpose of these questions is to help students think about the problem individually by listing stakeholders including the direct user and the stakeholders´ relationships to the problem and its solution prior starting to solve the problem in teams. One hundred (out of ~1600) students´ responses to three open-ended problem solving activities during two successive semesters were randomly selected and analyzed. Results showed improvement in students´ ability to identify the direct user over time. The majority of students´ responses shifted from identifying non-users instead of direct user in the first MEA, to identifying indirect-users in the second MEA, and to identifying direct user correctly in the third MEA. This shows a clear improvement in students´ ability to understand these problems over time. However, even for the third MEA, only 60% of students identified the direct user correctly, raising concerns about comprehension of the problem by about 40% of the students.