Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Session 1463

Integrating Academic and Experiential Learning Alice Swanger Manager, Education and Training Focus:HOPE Center for Advanced Technologies

INTRODUCTION This paper is one of a series of four developed for the ASEE conference in June, 1998. As it is not the first component of this group’s effort, I will not repeat my colleagues’ introduction to the nature of the NSF sponsored Greenfield Coalition at Focus:HOPE’s Center for Advanced Technologies (CAT). Instead, the center point of this paper will be our efforts to understand, map, appreciate, and measure the learning that is required for revenue production and the learning that is required for academic credit. This effort is a critical component of the mandate that the National Science Foundation has given us. It assumes that the reader accepts, at least for a moment, the premise that engineering is a practiced based profession whose purpose is to contribute to the tangible form of some planned item.

PEDAGOGY It is sound educational theory that when a broad theoretical concept is learned in tandem with a rich specific context, the acquired knowledge is more readily transferable.1 The next time a related, different specific context is encountered, the transition of the old knowledge to the new context is both easier and faster than acquiring brand-new knowledge. An example of this is the manufacturing engineer who has learned, say, design of cutting tools in both theory and practice. When the need to design stamping tools is confronted, the necessary theory and skills can be attained more quickly through relationships of common facets of machining and stamping.

It has also been well established that the maximum transfer of knowledge occurs when learning is as close to the real-world application as possible. Learning in-context also implies, however, that we evaluate knowledge and subsequent performance competency through means which are consistent with the context, the depth and the rigor we are seeking. Attempts at evaluating candidates (student) performance by applying traditional means from university practice has fallen short of assessment needs. In order to bring manufacturing education and practice into the same space-time continuum, other potential assessment models have had to be examined.

ARCHITECTURAL SKETCH The Greenfield Coalition is in the midst of an effort to create a system that will permit two entirely different operational systems (Industry and Academia) to work toward a common goal. Both want to produce a competent and employable manufacturing engineer / technologist. One will not dominate the other because both have essential roles in our

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Swanger, A. (1998, June), Integrating Academic And Experiential Learning Paper presented at 1998 Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/1-2--7207