@article {23581,
	title = {Introductory Engineering Decision-Making: Guiding First-Year Students to Relativism in Software Design},
	journal = {IEEE Transactions on Education},
	volume = {62},
	year = {2019},
	pages = {199-208},
	abstract = {Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry{\textquoteright}s model for intellectual development. The results show that students can reach the relativism stage of Perry{\textquoteright}s model in their first year of studies. Background: Students must move beyond a dualistic worldview to be engineers. Felder and Brent provided a list of recommendations to promote this type of intellectual development in students; active learning strategies strongly align with these recommendations. While active learning is common in programming courses (sometimes taking the form of project-based learning), they are typically tightly controlled by the instructor, and limited in scope (both in time and complexity), potentially reducing their impact on students. Intended Outcomes: This course and term-long project provided students a supportive environment in which to develop their decision-making skills, and promoted their intellectual development through Perry{\textquoteright}s stages related to software design. Application Design: Aligned with Felder and Brent{\textquoteright}s recommendations and Kuh{\textquoteright}s High Impact Practices, a course was built to: 1) teach students procedural programming, with 2) a focus on software design and open-ended problem solving, while maintaining 3) a supportive environment for skill acquisition. Findings: A mixed methods study showed the majority of students align themselves with the relativism stage of intellectual development at the end of the course. This study also illuminated the decision-making processes of teams of students in a first-year software design course.},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TE.2019.2921273},
	author = {Christopher Rennick and Carol C. W. Hulls and Kenneth N. McKay}
}
