How to adopt the practice of critiques to engineering design education?

Crits are widely used as part of the “creative discipline” as the main means of assessment. In engineering, the assessment tends to focus on technical feedback and lacks the discussion and reflection that are integral parts of the crit. We hypothesize that the crit can challenge the students to come up with better solutions.

There are no guidelines how to run a crit in any discipline and very few hints of it ever being used as part of engineering design. Luckily we have Yoon Soo, an expert of crits and the developer of 'Peer Crits' for our team! We ran pilot studies with over 40 students under different conditions ('use of crit' was one of the conditions), and found that it helped significantly improve the level on creativity in the designs they produced. This motivated us to give the crit a try in an actual class room setting.

The Crit was used in MNE 497 (Senior Capstone Mechanical Engineering class at UMass Dartmouth) to assess projects during the concepts embodiment phase. We used the Peer Crit format where teams were grouped together and asked to critique the projects in small groups (3 projects per group). Each team put up the original project objective, list of stakeholder needs, and current risks for everybody to see and then gave an overview of their chosen design. The students were tasked to discuss:

-The strengths of the design

-The weaknesses of the design

-Suggested improvements for the design

Each team took notes on the three topics. Each project was discussed for about 20 minutes.

After one hour, each team briefed the instructor (Katja) on the strengths, weaknesses and suggested improvements for their projects. Trina also observed some of the team interactions.

Here are the first observations from the use of the crit process:

+ universal participation by all students

+ teams took the crit and suggestions with an open mind (they were not defensive at all)

+ the feedback was more in depth than the usual technical feedback

- 2/12 teams felt they gained more from the instructor than from their peers

- the time it takes for the instructor to go over all the teams can be very long


If anybody would like to test the use of peer crits in their engineering classes, let us know we would be happy give step by step guidelines and other helpful tips on how to do it. Also, if somebody has already tried using crits in their classrooms, please share with us!