A Design-Based Learning Approach for Fostering Sustainability Competency in Engineering Education
School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hunan City University, Yiyang 413002, China
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Sustainability 2020, 12(7), 2958; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072958
Received: 21 February 2020
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Revised: 14 March 2020
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Accepted: 4 April 2020
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Published: 8 April 2020
(This article belongs to the Collection Approaches and Methods of Science Teaching and Sustainable Development)
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.
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Keywords:
sustainability education; design-based learning; individual competency; engineering education
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MDPI and ACS Style
Huang, Z.; Peng, A.; Yang, T.; Deng, S.; He, Y. A Design-Based Learning Approach for Fostering Sustainability Competency in Engineering Education. Sustainability 2020, 12, 2958. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072958
AMA Style
Huang Z, Peng A, Yang T, Deng S, He Y. A Design-Based Learning Approach for Fostering Sustainability Competency in Engineering Education. Sustainability. 2020; 12(7):2958. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072958
Chicago/Turabian StyleHuang, Zhiliang, Annan Peng, Tongguang Yang, Shuguang Deng, and Yuexia He. 2020. "A Design-Based Learning Approach for Fostering Sustainability Competency in Engineering Education" Sustainability 12, no. 7: 2958. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072958
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