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Chemical Engineers' Creating Concept Maps: A Prewriting Activity

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED) Technical Session 7: Innovative Pedagogy

Tagged Division

Chemical Engineering Division (ChED)

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43193

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43193

Download Count

217

Paper Authors

biography

Elif Miskioglu Bucknell University

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Dr. Elif Miskioglu is an early-career engineering education scholar and educator. She holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering (with Genetics minor) from Iowa State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Ohio State University. Her early Ph.D. work focused on the development of bacterial biosensors capable of screening pesticides for specifically targeting the malaria vector mosquito, Anopheles gambiae. As a result, her diverse background also includes experience in infectious disease and epidemiology, providing crucial exposure to the broader context of engineering problems and their subsequent solutions. These diverse experiences and a growing passion for improving engineering education prompted Dr. Miskioglu to change her career path and become a scholar of engineering education. As an educator, she is committed to challenging her students to uncover new perspectives and dig deeper into the context of the societal problems engineering is intended to solve. As a scholar, she seeks to not only contribute original theoretical research to the field, but work to bridge the theory-to-practice gap in engineering education by serving as an ambassador for empirically driven educational practices.

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Abstract

This full paper describes the implementation and evaluation of concept maps as a pre-writing activity in chemical engineering. Concept mapping provides a non-linear means for organizing information around a central topic that allows the creator to demonstrate their knowledge of a topic, identify new connections among concepts related to the central topic, and identify areas where they need more information to understand the topic. Chemical engineering students tasked with developing a technical proposal were given a concept mapping assignment as an early pre-writing task. Participants were from two courses, Technical & Professional Communication and Separation Processes, and ranged from sophomore to senior. Concept maps were scored using traditional scoring, a method that computes a numerical concept map score from the number of concepts, number of hierarchies, length of the highest hierarchy, and number of crosslinks (connections across hierarchies). Concept maps were also scored qualitatively by the instructor for structure. For the most part traditional scoring correlated with qualitative analysis (a higher traditional score signaled a more complex map structure) but notable exceptions occurred. These exceptions typically fell into high traditional score/simple structure and were maps that included many concepts but did not synthesize connections between the concepts through crosslinks. Use of concept maps did force students to organize their ideas prior to writing, and did cause many to realize they needed to do further research before writing. Used in concert with other pre-writing activities, they may serve as a valuable tool for engineers in preparing papers and other writing products. From an instructor standpoint, evaluation can be difficult; however, the widespread correlation between traditional scoring and the instructor’s qualitative score may suggest that traditional scoring could be leveraged as a mechanism for feedback. The relative simplicity of traditional scoring, and current efforts by others to create automated traditional scoring tools to support concept map use, promote the feasibility of more widespread adoption of concept mapping.

Miskioglu, E. (2023, June), Chemical Engineers' Creating Concept Maps: A Prewriting Activity Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43193

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