Design for Impact: Reimagining Inquiry-Based Activities in Heat Transfer for Effectiveness and Ease of Faculty Adoption
- Conference
- Location
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Seattle, Washington
- Publication Date
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June 14, 2015
- Start Date
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June 14, 2015
- End Date
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June 17, 2015
- ISBN
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978-0-692-50180-1
- ISSN
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2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
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NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
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4
- Page Numbers
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26.463.1 - 26.463.4
- DOI
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10.18260/p.23801
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/23801
- Download Count
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484
Paper Authors
Margot A Vigeant Bucknell University
Margot Vigeant is a professor of chemical engineering and an associate dean of 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 and technology in general and games in particular can be used to improve student engagement.
Michael J. Prince Bucknell University
Katharyn E. K. Nottis Bucknell University
Dr. Nottis is an Educational Psychologist and Professor 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.
Milo Koretsky Oregon State University
Milo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has research activity in areas related engineering education and is interested in integrating technology into effective educational practices and in promoting the use of higher-level cognitive skills in engineering problem solving. His research interests particularly focus on what prevents students from being able to integrate and extend the knowledge developed in specific courses in the core curriculum to the more complex, authentic problems and projects they face as professionals. Dr. Koretsky is one of the founding members of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research at OSU.
Abstract
In our prior work, we developed a collection of inquiry-‐based activities to repair engineering students’ misconceptions in the areas of heat transfer and thermodynamics. Students who used these activities in laboratories scored significantly higher on subsequent concept inventories. This work has three goals, and after two years of work we have completed the first and are nearing completion of the second goal. First, we re-‐designed our inquiry-‐based activities for heat transfer by specifically modifying them in ways that make them easier for faculty to implement in the classroom. The original activities rely largely on student experiment, and faculty comments discussed how money, space, and time all constrained their ability to assign experiments to small groups of students. Based on this feedback, we have produced four new variations on the inquiry-‐based activities. These involve: a) replacing the students’ experiments with simulations; b) replacing the students’ experiments with the students observing the experiment as an in-‐class demonstration; c) the students’ watching the simulation as an in-‐class demonstration and d) replacing both simulation and experiment with an in-‐class thought experiment. Our second goal, which is nearing completion, is testing variations a-‐d at a number of different institutions and observing the impact on students’ conceptual understanding. We will use students concept inventory scores, as well as faculty feedback on ease-‐of-‐use, to judge the effectiveness and usability of each variation. Third and finally, in the coming academic year, we will provide both the full menu of activities and the effectiveness data to faculty broadly and monitor the adoption “in the wild”.
Vigeant, M. A., & Prince, M. J., & Nottis, K. E. K., & Koretsky, M. (2015, June), Design for Impact: Reimagining Inquiry-Based Activities in Heat Transfer for Effectiveness and Ease of Faculty Adoption Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.23801
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