Curious About Student Curiosity: Implications of Pedagogical Approach for Students’ Mindset
- Conference
- Location
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Salt Lake City, Utah
- Publication Date
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June 23, 2018
- Start Date
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June 23, 2018
- End Date
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July 27, 2018
- Conference Session
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Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division Technical Session 2
- Tagged Division
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Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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10
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--30245
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/30245
- Download Count
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510
Paper Authors
Margot A. Vigeant Bucknell University
Margot Vigeant is a professor of chemical engineering at Bucknell University. She earned her B.S. in chemical engineering from Cornell University, and her M.S. and Ph.D., also in chemical engineering, from the University of Virginia. Her primary research focus is on engineering pedagogy at the undergraduate level. She is particularly interested in the teaching and learning of concepts related to thermodynamics. She is also interested in active, collaborative, and problem-based learning, and in the ways hands-on activities such as making, technology, and games can be used to improve student engagement.
Michael J. Prince Bucknell University
Dr. Michael Prince is a professor of chemical engineering at Bucknell University and co-director of the National Effective Teaching Institute. His research examines a range of engineering education topics, including how to assess and repair student misconceptions and how to increase the adoption of research-based instructional strategies by college instructors and corporate trainers. He is actively engaged in presenting workshops on instructional design to both academic and corporate instructors.
Katharyn E. K. Nottis Bucknell University
Dr. Nottis is an Educational Psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Education at Bucknell University. Her research has focused on meaningful learning in science and engineering education, approached from the perspective of Human Constructivism. She has authored several publications and given numerous presentations on the generation of analogies, misconceptions, and facilitating learning in science and engineering education. She has been involved in collaborative research projects focused on conceptual learning in chemistry, chemical engineering, seismology, and astronomy.
Amy Frances Golightly
Bucknell University
orcid.org/0000-0002-5560-8959
Abstract
Student curiosity compels learners to go beyond what is presented in the classroom, to connect what they have discovered with other concepts, and to finally create new items and knowledge to help address the world’s problems. Encouraging this entrepreneurial mindset is a goal within a number of courses at our institution. While not every learner arrives in our classrooms innately curious about the course topic, by using alternative instructional approaches, perhaps curiosity might be fostered more broadly. The goal of this study is to explore the hypothesis that courses that include open-ended, real-world problems will foster growth of the entrepreneurial mindset to a greater extent than courses that do not have these attributes. We used the SIMS instrument (Guay et al., 2000) for situational motivation in conjunction with a situational curiosity sub-scale (Chen et al., 1999) to assess the situational curiosity and motivational states of engineering undergraduates over the course of three semesters. Students and faculty reported on the extent to which open-ended, real-world problems were a part of each course, along with a host of additional factors including the voluntary nature of the course, whether or not projects resulted in a physical artifact, and if students worked on interdisciplinary teams. Results suggest that interdisciplinary work on “real” problems for actual clients has a significant positive correlation with students’ intrinsic motivation and curiosity.
Vigeant, M. A., & Prince, M. J., & Nottis, K. E. K., & Golightly, A. F. (2018, June), Curious About Student Curiosity: Implications of Pedagogical Approach for Students’ Mindset Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30245
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