A Design-Based Learning Approach for Fostering Sustainability Competency in Engineering Education

Zhiliang Huang, Annan Peng, Tongguang Yang, Shuguang Deng and Yuexia He
Additional contact information
Zhiliang Huang: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China
Annan Peng: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China
Tongguang Yang: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China
Shuguang Deng: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China
Yuexia He: School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-17

Abstract: This paper provides and illustrates a design-based learning (DBL) approach for fostering individual sustainability competency in engineering education. We performed two studies with engineering students in typical educational activities. The first study helped students perform a topic-specific design task in the practicum unit of a sensor technology course, which compared the performance of the DBL approach and conventional passive learning approach. The second study guided students to develop innovative projects for participating in the "Internet Plus" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (IPIEC). To validate the proposed approach, stakeholder questionnaires and performance evaluations were implemented. The results show that the DBL approach was viable for sustainability competency teaching in terms of learning demand and teaching procedure. We found that students in the DBL group gave more prominence in the individual competencies, such as system-thinking, multidisciplinary applications, and collaboration. These findings suggest that applying the DBL approach to train sustainability competency in engineering education is beneficial for promoting students’ abilities in dealing with challenges involved in sustainability practice.

Keywords: sustainability education; design-based learning; individual competency; engineering education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2958/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2958/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:2958-:d:342664

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().