Portland, Oregon
June 23, 2024
June 23, 2024
June 26, 2024
MECH - Technical Session 7: Assessment and Evaluation in Engineering Education
Mechanical Engineering Division (MECH)
Diversity
17
10.18260/1-2--47530
https://peer.asee.org/47530
35
Sandra is an Interdisciplinary Degree PhD Candidate at MIT, based in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses on the understanding and improvement of homework problems in traditionally taught technical engineering classes.
Although lecture-based courses are common for teaching technical material to undergraduate engineering majors, it is well documented that they are not the best way for students to learn. However, significant barriers to change prevent many lecturers from transitioning towards research-based educational practices. A closer look at how students interact with and learn from homework problems — seen as a major influence of learning methodology to students — may help circumvent this tension by uncovering opportunities for accessible changes. In this paper, I qualitatively examine student problem solving paths through a situative lens: exploring the tension of agency between students, homework problems, and class norms, and characterizing under-researched strategies associated with learning in a technical class. Furthermore, I focus on how and when students use problems as epistemic agents.
Seven students who were enrolled in a thermal-fluids class at a university in the northeast US were each asked to solve two problems in a think-aloud interview. Thematic analysis of video recordings and student work products was conducted. In addition to student approaches that align with existing literature, I observed instances of students interacting with homework problems as though they were epistemic agents. Viewed through the cultural pulls of technical classes and the allocation of agency in both learning and problem solving, this finding can both help educators understand their students’ approaches and serve as a warning for the implications of current teaching methods.
Huffman, S. W. (2024, June), Homework Problems as Epistemic Agents: Unpacking Students' Problem-Solving Approaches in a Technical Engineering Class Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47530
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015