Resumen de Measuring the effects of goal alignment on innovative engineering design projects
Gregory M. Mocko, Blake J. Linnerud
Many senior level capstone design courses encourage students to develop innovative solutions to open design projects fromindustry partners. Student teams that function at a high level are more likely to develop innovative solutions. Priorresearchers have proposed that there are four stages to the development of groups: forming, storming, norming, andperforming. It has been seen that students often get ‘‘stuck’’ in the storming stage and only after they coalesce as a team andset common goals (Norming Phase) can they perform at the highest level to achieve said goals (Performing Phase). Theresearch presented in this paper, focuses on two main areas: (1) understanding what motivates undergraduate engineeringstudents when working on design projects and (2) determining the effects of goal alignment interventions on design teams.A study of senior-level mechanical engineering students was conducted to determine if the effects of setting common goalscould be quantified. Five of the total eighteen design teams were selected and guided to set common goals during theirdesign project. Each team was composed of four or five mechanical engineering students. It was found that the teams thatreceived ‘‘interventions’’ had an increase in level of performance (p-value = 0.14) and motivation (p-value = 0.19) whencompared to teams that were left to their own devices. The main conclusions are summarized as: (1) interventions can beeffectively used to explicitly set common goals for the group, (2) interventions have immediate positive effects on the levelsof performance and levels of motivation, and (3) a positive correlation between performance and motivation is found.
