, 2016). We use themetaphor of the soul to narrate our experiences in the field, a majority of which includeexperiences we shared being in the same engineering education PhD program. The metaphor ofthe soul serves as a vehicle to communicate our experiences, conceptions, hopes, fears, andaspirations. The soul is as much an idea felt, as it is a scholarship known through inquiry. Weexperienced this essence as it moved across individuals in our department, and believe it is feltfurther in the engineering education community. The soul fuels continuous evolution by creatingtension and using it as energy to find purpose in our work.IntentionOur intention is to share our experiences and prompt reflection from the engineering educationcommunity so that
abilityto transfer the closed-ended skills used on a typical math problem to an open-ended problem.The Reflective Practitioner. A study by Valkenberg and Dorst discussed the use of descriptive andreflective practices in design [6]. This paper drew heavily on Schön’s paradigm of reflective practice [7].Schön contends that every design problem is necessarily a unique challenge. Teaching students the skillsto reflect on their design while innovating, in order to advance the design, is essential to teaching design.This also can lead to problems, since if every problem is unique, and the students want a single concreteroadmap for how a project should go, there is bound to be conflict. Valkenberg and Dorst discussed fourdifferent design activities
with asingle hand, in order to provide an in-class example. (a) (b)Figure 1. a) Solid Model constructed by student showing the exploded view of child’s cornpopper and b) picture of actual product.The second assignment required students to investigate ongoing engineering work at ourcampus’s startup/business incubator (Rose-Hulman Ventures), producing ethnographic insightsby observing as comprehensively as possible actions, statements, and activities that occurred.They were to note how decisions were made, conclusions reached, and problems solvedincluding what kinds of evidence, reasoning, and persuasion that were used to communicate toothers. In addition, the students were to reflect
learners to apply new knowledge to ISIEnvision credit ratings, 2. student motivation metrics which are linked to students’ ability toemploy learning strategies and 3. student reflective observation and conceptualization on theirown ability to apply new knowledge. Findings of this study are preliminary and includequalitative measures but point to potential teaching/learning mechanisms which may be furtherexplored in successive studies.IntroductionThe civil engineering profession faces an increasing range of demands including preparingstudents for evolving challenges including design and maintenance of aging infrastructure,development of sustainable infrastructure and resilient design. The shift from an industrializedeconomy to the knowledge economy
, andsociety. The institution (the school) bears ethical and chartered obligations to society to graduatequalified individuals technically-ready and ethically-primed to enter into professional life. Theinstitution must choose to confer a degree based on course grades (and GPA in relevantcoursework). Course grades in turn should reflect individual student mastery of course material.How, then, should an assessment model be structured to selectively promote collaboration andstill maintain the integrity of the individual educational assessment process? We seek to answertwo questions in this assessment. How do we adjust the course assessment model (types ofassignments used/points allocated) to best teach a classroom of digital natives with varyingdegrees
faculty and student beliefs aboutteaching and learning related to faculty pedagogical activities and actions? Very little prior workintegrates student-side and instructor-side preferences and actions, and this paper extends ourunderstanding of this alignment. We expect that a clearer understanding of the alignmentbetween faculty and students may help explain student academic performance. This paperfocuses on characterizing the alignment, while our future research explores its relationship tostudent outcomes.Our data analysis reveals the following key insights about our research question. Faculty-studentlearning styles misalignment is largest along the active-reflective dimension of the ILS. In turn,faculty who are more misaligned with their
knowledgeparticipants (middle school students) brought to a two-week STEM summer enrichmentprogram. The study, which is a small piece of a much larger research endeavor, primarily reliedon data collected from interviews with eight individual pod leaders. The results of this studyindicated that elicitation strategies are sometimes hindered by programmatic features–primarilythe time constraints and subsequent lack of time for reflection–of summer enrichment programs.IntroductionThe renewed focus in STEM education has led to the increased number of summer enrichmentprograms across the United States. These programs and other out of school experiences areintended to increase student awareness about and interest in STEM while bringing more studentsinto STEM fields
-unit course taught in collaboration with SJSU's Department ofHistory. All these changes culminated into making the program the success it is today.Due to these innovations and constant evolution, the 2014 cohort was unlike any other. SJSUstudents were given first-hand experience about technology's global role, entrepreneurship, andcross-cultural collaboration when they participated in the International Innovation &Entrepreneur Leadership Experience (IIELE) at Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU) inJungli, Taiwan. Beginning with the 2014 cohort, we renamed the GTI program to reflect thechange in focus. The new name is the Global Technology Institute (GTI*). In three weeks,students created innovative business propositions, toured
reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civicresponsibility, and strengthen communities. Students in a technical elective robotics class in theMechanical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) optedfor either a final project or service learning for 25% of their grade. For SL, the students had towork with elementary and middle-school children in San Antonio over a period of 10 weeks tomentor them on building and programming robots with LEGO® Mindstorms® for the FIRST®LEGO® League tournament. In parallel, the undergraduates also learnt LEGO® Mindstorms inthe class by creating robots for assigned labs. This way they were able to apply concepts taughtin the class towards community service. As part of the
retirement age within the U.S. government.2 In addition, students who do pursueengineering degrees do not reflect the diversity of students in the United States, a pattern ofenrollment that is likely to have a number of negative consequences, both for the successfulpractice of engineering and for the resolution of broader societal issues. Concerns about the lackof engineering exposure for all children and ensuring a larger, more reliable supply of futureengineers have been accompanied by the realization that we have not yet determined the bestway to inform children of engineering skills and concepts.3 There is also continued debate on whether national standards should be developed andimplemented for K-12 engineering education. A 2010 report
cognitive, behavioral,and attitudinal domains of global competency.10Overview of Service-LearningService-learning is the intentional integration of service experiences into academic courses toenhance the learning of the core content and to give students broader learning opportunitiesabout themselves and society at large. Service-learning has been defined “a credit-bearingeducational experience in which students participate in an organized service activity that meetsidentified community needs and reflect on the service activity in such a way as to gain furtherunderstanding of the course content, a broader appreciation of the discipline, and an enhanced
approaches they used. For instance, the instructors faced aninteraction barrier—sources of resistance to initiating a student-instructor interaction, such as alack of instructor self-confidence or student reticence. We illustrate challenges instructors facedand their approaches to resolve them through reflective episodes from the instructors. Ouraudience is twofold: Education researchers will find new lines of investigation for future work onstudios, while early instructors will learn how to get started with teaching in studios.IntroductionStudio instruction is a useful active learning alternative to passive approaches, such as purelecture. Drawing on a tradition from architecture and the fine arts [1], studio instructionde-emphasizes the instructor
professional developmentstreams, and a resolute approach to Scaffolding Instruction that leads to mastery in the student's area offocus. The last two components provide feedback and reflection: Assessment of Performance Learningquantifies students' progress, and Reflection and Evaluation, where improvement opportunities help thestudent to develop further. Incorporating personalization at every touchpoint of a graduate student'sacademic journey creates an authentic, customized, student-centered approach to graduate education.This paper describes the model, the literature behind its development, and the assessments used to guidestudents.IntroductionGraduate STEM training and career preparation has historically followed a "one size fits all" approach
differing levels of experience with critical andanalytical thinking.BottlenecksIn the course of teaching engineering ethics a few possible bottlenecks exist. First, it could bedifficult to motivate students to take the course seriously as it is not one of the primaries in theengineering curriculum. Students will need to be convinced that the course is intended toencourage genuine moral reflection rather than mere recitation. This bottleneck could beovercome by creating an opportunity to exercise and refine students’ critical, moral abilities. Ifthey are invited to reflect on realistic, engaging case studies in ways that respect their moralcapabilities, they will sense that they are being respected as moral agents and thinkers in theirown right. As
students, industry, and society as a whole? How Page 21.42.4can resources be synergistically integrated to support such an effort? What are the majorchallenges or barriers present that must be overcome in order to create such a system?In response to these questions, they present a concept map to explore how faculty educationaldevelopment could support and greatly enhance an entire system revolving around facultydevelopment in teaching and learning. Utilizing and reflecting upon the literature, major issuesconsidered that relate to the questions above include various roles in the higher educationengineering community; relationships between
are“intentionally designed with organic elements” [10, p. 854]. Through articulating and embodyinga philosophy, and through forming a web of relationships, a CoT supports its members to engagein critical reflection and develop a plan of action to change systems in their institutional contexts.In this paper, we analyze our case study as an example of a community of transformation andwill use this term when referring specifically to this community. However, since CoTs aresituated within the scholarly lineage of CoPs and share many important features, we also drawupon literature about CoPs more broadly to understand the structures and interactions in thisCoT.Structure, Agency, and TransformationWhy have efforts to create pervasive changes in
, and meet objectives.These emphasize ethics and values of students as crucial to earning an engineering degree.However, at many schools these discussions are saved for specific courses on ethics or designrather than intentional integration across the degree. This paper explores the intentional andexplicit inclusion of character and virtue building in the context of a traditional chemicalengineering course during the sophomore year.Student taking their first chemical engineering specific course, Introduction to ChemicalEngineering Processes, were asked to reflect throughout the semester on the importance ofvirtue/character in their development as a chemical engineer. These reflections were graded workwithin the class and either replaced or
upon completing the two-semester capstone sequence. Next, the instructors identifiedlearning outcomes, which describe what the students would be expected to know or formally do.This effort was followed by identifying assessment techniques and filling in the course's content.Key aspects of the design mindset which were infused in this new course included: beinginquisitive and open, being empathetic to others’ needs, being accepting of ambiguity,questioning critically, and a proclivity to taking purposeful action.The two instructors involved in this redesign both have experience in the industry of productdesign and development, and aimed to structure the course and project path to reflect many ofthe practices that designers and engineers might
byfostering a sense of belonging in the classroom, providing authentic engineering experiences, andproviding opportunities for mentorship. Surveys and a reflection exercise were used to capturethe student experience. Outcomes demonstrated that students thought the final project allowedthem to practice “doing engineering,” and reported that the instructor sharing about her journeythrough engineering and hearing about their peer’s experiences were impactful on their sense ofbelonging. Students reported the impact of sharing the reflection results as itself being impactfulon their sense of belonging as well. This work shows the impact on belonging of fosteringconnections for students- among each other, with faculty, and with professionals in the field
diversity of the MHCC Head Start community, andensuring that the research was feasible for families. Data collection spanned approximately 1year and included in-depth qualitative interviews via phone or video before, in the middle, and atthe end of the program and during the fall of the child’s kindergarten year. Data collection alsoincluded observations of all program events, tracking of program participation, anddocumentation of other program artifacts, such as pictures, reflections, family communication,and meeting notes. Each case study family was assigned a research liaison that maintainedongoing contact with the family and spoke either Spanish or English, based on the family’spreference. All data were collected and analyzed in the preferred
design as one of his project assignments over the years, including industrial designaspects. However, through a collaborative effort, the project had to be modified to reflect the newaim. Thus, student groups were asked to design a product (possibly a fastener, a light fixture, or aconstruction toy) with 4-6 components based on the idea of biomimicking climbing plants. Thedesign was expected to have an obvious art component via use of industrial design, also includingaesthetics, colors, or movements. Students followed the steps of the product development processwith additional assignments being interjected into the regular project workflow. These assignmentsincluded a “Business Thesis Template” a document that defines the business idea or the
Photovoice reflections as well as written and oral presentations during andat the end of the term and are based on evaluating the level of practical knowledge gained by the studentsduring the development of such projects. As a general outcome, students became more involved duringclass time, and also they have shown interest in other research areas, being involved in extra courseresearch activities. Details related to the intervention and lessons learned will be provided so otherengineering instructors can easily re-create in the classroom. Overall, many different fields ofengineering instructors can benefit from this project-based approach to combine theory and practice toprepare the students to become better problem solvers and obtain practical
engineerThese questions revolved around the idea of reflecting on what it is like to be an engineer, aswell as reflecting on what they personally did that resembled an engineer. Embodying these traitsand reflecting on them has the function of shaping both, their subjective and objective identities,as perceived by others [6]. The first question was asking about what these children thought thetraits of an engineer to be, and the second part of the question was about which of these traits didthe children display while engaging with the kits. A discussion follows below of the moreprominent responses. Realistic Thinking. Realistic thinking was one of the traits that was recognized asimportant for engineers. Engineers do need to be realistic when
Computer Science (A Case Study)Abstract:As technology continues to evolve and spaces in the field of Computer Science (CS) areexpanding, the promotion of equity, inclusion, and representation for all need to reflect thisevolution and expansion. Even though efforts have been made to address such challenges forwomen and minorities in CS, more work needs to be done. This is especially the case for blackwomen, who account for less than 3% of the tech workforce. As Computer Scientists, blackwomen face regular affronts to their character and capabilities because of their race and gender.While the combination of racial and gender discrimination have spanned over decades for blackwomen in CS, the tech industry, and related spaces, efforts regarding their
assistants. Any studentinterested in applying as an undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA) was required to complete aone-credit course titled “Psychology applied to teaching” before they can begin their duties as ateaching assistant. In this program, faculty are instructed to “integrate the student into thedevelopment of the course” and provide mentorship to the students. At the end of the semester,each UTA is given a questionnaire to reflect on their experience as a teaching assistant [5].The psychology department at the University of Scranton [2] used a similar approach in theirtraining of UTAs in their undergraduate coursework. The students must first complete aone-credit seminar to prepare for their teaching assistantship. The training seminar
workshop series provides teaching assistants with the ability to recognize andconfront bias among individuals and within teams, helps them develop an understanding ofpower, privilege, and oppression, and equips them with the tools to employ their knowledgeprofessionally. The workshops feature individual reflection activities and small groupdiscussions, culminating in a community-wide discussion on lessons learned and actionableitems to build an inclusive community within our first-year program.To understand the value of this training for the undergraduate teaching assistants, a survey wasconducted of participants before and after participation in the workshops. The survey aims tocapture the practicality of the training and the teaching assistants
global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors. 5) an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts. 8) an ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies.Riley’s text uses a modular format that engages students in a four-step process (Engage, Analyze,Reflect, and Change). Figure 1: Learning Process for ModulesThe modules presented in Riley’s text can be integrated “as-is” into typical thermodynamicscourses. However, as the modules are not
inrelated fields indicates students in blended engineering courses have improved attendance,motivation, and collaboration. We hypothesized that restructuring to a blended course wouldimprove coding confidence and competence over the traditional course. Two courses werecompared: one traditional course and another with programming content moved to weekly onlinemodules. A programming project was assigned after completion of the coding material in eachclass. Modules were created using a backwards design approach. The desired codingcompetencies were identified as: pseudocode, loops, matrix operations, and data visualization.Modules for each of these subjects contained review, practice, and reflection components.Review and practice materials were
content and reflections from the instructor, TAs, and students.1. IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic disrupted higher education worldwide in March 2020. Colleges anduniversities abruptly stopped in-person instruction and instead required remote teaching.Instructors’ challenges included preparing virtual lessons, learning videoconferencing software,and selecting appropriate graded assessments. At the same time, students’ learning routines weredisrupted as many returned home and were away from their peers; some students also lost thesafety net that the university provided, such as reliable food and shelter [1]. Furthermore, bothstudents and faculty were affected by limited internet connectivity and additional familyresponsibilities due to the
, and a practical leadershipexperience. We discuss the pedagogical approaches that: 1) foster reflective self-leadership; 2)support the emergence of personal vision; and 3) create learning communities. We conclude bysharing recommendations for engineering educators to implement engineering-graduate-student-specific, leadership development initiatives at their institutions.ContextThe Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at U of T is home to approximately 3000graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and 5000 undergraduate students. The graduatestudent population is divided equally into three degree-programs, PhD, research-based Masters,and course-based, professional Masters. Of all graduate students, 29% identify as women and42% are