Conference Session

Tricks of the Trade for Research

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Richard Felder; David Ollis

. Most new Ph.D.’s who join faculties have only beenprepared to work on a research problem someone else has defined. They are expected to figureout for themselves how to plan a course, teach it effectively, assess the learning of their students,define their own research problems, identify and approach potential funding sources, form aresearch team of graduate students and possibly faculty collaborators, write successful proposals,carry out the research, disseminate the results, balance the competing time demands imposed byteaching, research, and service, and integrate themselves into their campus culture. Page 7.668.1 Proceedings of the

Conference Session

Trends in Mechanical Engineering

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Ruben Rojas-Oviedo

may proveuseful to review typical past and prevailing typical expectations of both Industry and Academia,i.e., what Industry wants from Academia and, in turn, what Academia expects from Industryfrom both from the industry perspective and from the academic perspective.II. Partnerships and Collaboration: Part I.In the past Industry has given relatively small amounts of money in the form of matching grantsto just about any academic institution that was advocated by some internal alumni. Largeramounts were given to those academic institutions identified for some reason or another asfocus institutions. Grants, student scholarships and in kind donations were given to academicinstitutions that were geographically co-located with corporate facilities

Conference Session

Current Issues in Computing

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Lonnie Welch

associated with cooperation and collaboration. As thedemands of the curriculum grow, instructors need to explore ways to effectively engage students,enhance their critical abilities and assist them in assimilating an increasingly complex body ofknowledge. Just as teams of software engineers are assembled in the workplace to manage thedemands for high quality outcomes, teams of students can be assembled in the classroom to meetthe need for high quality learning. The remainder of this section presents examples of cooperative learning from thesoftware engineering class.Cooperative Learning Activity 1: Software Engineering Team Project One of the fundamental concepts taught in this course is a software engineering process.The reason for

Conference Session

ASEE Multimedia Session

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Leonardo Rivera

Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education”1. Icesi UniversityIcesi University was founded 22 years ago as a private small business school. It offered initiallyan undergraduate program in Business Administration. Five years after that the undergraduateprogram in Computer Engineering began to be offered. Also, the school was offering anassortment of graduate programs in Business-related subjects.These two undergraduate programs had separate Operations Research classes, but in 1996 and asa result of a review in their curricula, it was decided that they would take the same class in mixedclassrooms.The school then decided to broaden its academic programs

Conference Session

Understanding Students: Cognition

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Edward Greitzer; Diane H. Soderholm; David Darmofal; Doris Brodeur

that illustrate and assess these concepts. Instructorsunderstand from past teaching experiences what are the most common difficulties in theirsubjects. In informal interviews conducted by colleagues and education specialists,instructors identify difficult concepts in their disciplines, based on the learning objectivesand outcomes of their courses. The purpose of the interviews is to develop lists ofconcepts that are required to achieve the measurable outcomes, to select those conceptsthat are most difficult for students to master, and to document the known misconceptionswhich lead to learning difficulties.Instructional staff collaboration: In the large sophomore multidisciplinary core course, ateam of faculty, undergraduate and graduate

Conference Session

Outreach: Future Women in Engineering

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Donna Whiting; Marion Usselman

Engineering Education· Identify a problem or question related to gender equity that they wanted to pursue or investigate at their school using action research, and to implement their plan,· Return to Georgia Tech for periodic SummerScape meetings, and· Submit a written report detailing their activities and modified lesson plans.Teachers were also encouraged to observe each other periodically in the classroom to check ontheir progress in providing equitable attention to all students, and to conduct a gender equityworkshop for parents at their school.Online CommunityAll professional development materials and teacher final reports were posted online on aSummerScape WebCT course. The classroom instruments and activities were all available aspdf

Conference Session

Design and Innovation

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

William Snyder; Mike Toole; Mike Hanyak; Mathew Higgins; Daniel Hyde; Edward Mastascusa; Brian Hoyt; Michael Prince; Margot Vigeant

-assessment of team functioning. Team members set goals, periodically assess how well they are working together, and identify changes they will make to function effectively in the future.” † Reading the above five tenets, one can see that teamwork is an integral part of cooperative learning. Cooperative learning has many benefits beyond being a training ground for teamwork. “An extensive body of [educational] research confirms the effectiveness of cooperative learning in higher education. Relative to students taught conventionally, cooperatively-taught students tend to exhibit better grades on common tests, greater persistence through graduation, better analytical, creative, and critical

Conference Session

Special Topics

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Sheryl Gowen; Alisha Waller

explainingthe technical details of stress and strain may be appropriate for a class presentation in statics, itwould not be appropriate at a city council meeting. The final observation on formal oral communication we made was that all of the authorsseem to assume that participation implies improvement; that is, that doing a speech improvesone’s communication skills. None of the authors offered any evidence that students’ oralcommunication skills actually improved. There are many viable reasons for this, including thelimits of space in the article, the difficulty in measuring improvement in communication, and thechoice not to focus on that aspect in the research. However, it may also be that when it comes tocommunication skills, as a group

Conference Session

Freshman Curriculum Development

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Rita Caso; Jeff Froyd; Jan Rinehart; Ahmer Inam; Ann Kenimer; Carolyn Clark; Jim Morgan

for greater co herence in whatstudents are learning, intentional interaction among students within an academic context, and Page 7.120.2greater interaction between faculty and students. There are nine components in the LC model in Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Educationthe College of Engineering (COE) at A&M: (1) clustering of students in common courses (math,engineering, science); (2) using student teams inside and outside the classroom; (3)active/cooperative learning in the

Conference Session

ASEE Multimedia Session

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Dennis Field

that: Traditionally, students have been expected to make these sorts of connections on their own, outside the classroom. However, more teachers are finding that most students’ interest and ability in academics improve dramatically when they are helped to make the connection. ... Students’ involvement in schoolwork increases significantly when they are taught why they are learning concepts and how these concepts are used outside the classroom. And most students learn much better when allowed to work cooperatively with other students. (p. 31)Contextual learning has been endorsed by a number of other researchers[3],[4],[5] as well as aneffective process for education. Expanding the use of contextual learning in the

Conference Session

Design, Assessment, and Curriculum

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Teodora Rutar; Steven Beyerlein; Phillip Thompson; Lawrence McKenzie; Denny Davis; Kenneth Gentili; Patricia Daniels; Michael Trevisan

. Faculty who have implemented the instrumenthave found it to be a valuable classroom tool, promoting self-awareness of life-long learningskills in a variety of course settings and supporting action research on lower-division designexperiences. Their discoveries are summarized here using a framework for assessment literacythat is widely used in the K-12 education community.ROLE OF EARLY-PROGRAM ASSESSMENTRepresentatives of both industry and academia rank design process, teamwork, andcommunication among the top five capabilities that emerging engineers need to possess 1. Inresponse to such expectations, ABET Engineering Criteria 2000 now requires programs seekingaccreditation to not only develop key competency areas such as these, but also to devise

Conference Session

Recruiting/Retention--Lower Division

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Charles Abaté; Ramesh Gaonkar

sessions . And inaddition, trainees undergo performance reviews twice a semester, conducted by all of theirmanagers. (Based on student feedback, it appears that they highly value these performancereviews.)Learning Community:Nationwide, the first-semester attrition rate in technology programs is around 50% (Internetsurvey); this figure is similar to the data reported at the Fall, 1997 New York State EngineeringTechnology Conference at Morrisville, NY. At our college, attrition exceeds 60% of the enteringclass. There are many reasons for such a high attrition rate, but they tend to fall primarily intotwo broad categories: academic and social maladjustments. There are many research studiesthat have examined the issues of retention (persistence), and

Conference Session

K-12 Outreach Initiatives

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Martha Cyr; Lacey Prouty; Erik Rushton; Brian Gravel

, programimplementation will (rightfully) be challenging, if not impossible. Cooperation via an outreachfocus group, for example, with a school district at the point of initial program development andgrant proposal can be an integral part of the process. Initially, curricula must be examined andprospective areas for engineering content addition must be identified initially.Clear communication between district administrators, teachers, graduate students, and outreachproject representatives is crucial in the process of successful outreach development. Clearly,problems most often develop where the communication ties are weak or nonexistent. It shouldnever be assumed that project information will naturally disseminate to reach all partiesinvolved; direct

Conference Session

Tools of Teaching

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Robert Carpick

that students are not able,either psychologically or physiologically, to pay attention to the material nor to retain itthroughout a traditional lecture. Their study showed that students could recall approximately70% of the content from the first 10 minutes of the lecture but only 20% from the last 10minutes.In his book “Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and UniversityTeachers”, Wilber McKeachie enumerates several techniques that can be used to capture andmaintain the students' attention, such as referring to material that is likely to be on tests, usingchanges in voice, facial expression, and movement, audiovisual aids, eye contact, and givingexamples that are linked to student interests. Yet he concludes,“all of

Conference Session

Knowing Students:Diversity and Retention

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

John Demel

design-build-compete-document project. Most of the student teams design and build small autonomous robotsthat have to perform a given series of tasks. The classrooms used for these courses aretechnology enhanced such that each student has access to a computer and collaborative learningis facilitated4. In the classroom portion of the course, each faculty member has twoundergraduate Peer Mentors (teaching assistants) who help when the students are working ondaily assignments do much of the grading. When the students go to the hands-on labs, theteaching team consists of the faculty member, a graduate teaching (GTA) and two undergraduateteaching associates. The class size is limited to 36. The students work in teams of two or fourdepending on the

Conference Session

Product and Venture Creation Curriculum

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Ken Vickers; Otto Loewer; John Ahlen; Ron Foster; Greg Salamo

. In the past, a typical student graduating with ahigher-level degree in science and engineering would have little or no exposure to businessprinciples. The result has been a workforce entrant that has no preparation for many of tasks thatthey are expected to perform. By far the majority of such graduates will enter industry positionswhere they are involved in product development and support, as opposed to research anddevelopment. Understanding business objectives and how to work effectively as a team memberare critical aspects of product development and support.Creating a successful program requires integration of a number of factors. The critical rawingredients are qualified personnel to staff the Incubator, individuals with good ideas, and

Conference Session

Special Topics

Collection

2002 Annual Conference

Authors

Mary Ayre; Julie Mills

challenges: firstly to cater for the interestsand backgrounds of these diverse students during their professional education (one focus of thispaper) and then to change the culture of the engineering workforce and workplace to ensure thatthey can be comfortable and succeed in their profession [1, 3, 4].Why should increasing diversity in the classroom lead to changes in the curriculum?The most common and persistent concern of engineering departments relating to diversity is toimprove the recruitment and retention of women, initially as engineering students, but ultimatelyfor employment in the profession. Increasing the representation of women in the engineeringworkforce is desirable for the following reasons: · social justice considerations