Donath, L., & Craig, N., & Thompson, N., & Matthews, M. (2005, June), Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio  Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15392

\bibitem{asee_peer_15392}
  Donath, L., \& Craig, N., \& Thompson, N., \& Matthews, M. (2005, June), \emph{Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio}
  Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon.
  10.18260/1-2--15392

Loralee Donath, Nadia Craig, Nancy Thompson, and Michael Matthews.  "Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio".  2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon, 2005, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2005.  https://peer.asee.org/15392 Internet.  24 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_15392}
  Loralee Donath, Nadia Craig, Nancy Thompson, and Michael Matthews.
  "Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio".
  \emph{2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon, 2005, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2005.
  https://peer.asee.org/15392 Internet.  24 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_15392
author = "Loralee Donath, Nadia Craig, Nancy Thompson, and Michael Matthews"
title = "Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio"
booktitle = "2005 Annual Conference"
year = "2005"
month = "June"
address = "Portland, Oregon"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/15392}
number = {10.18260/1-2--15392}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - The National Academy of Engineering’s Engineer of 2020 project addressed the growing need to
pursue collaborations with multidisciplinary teams of experts, because of the increasing
complexity and scale of systems-based engineering problems15. These teams must be able to
communicate effectively with technical and non-technical people, to use technology to enhance
communication, and to understand the complexities that are associated with the social,
environmental, and technical aspects of their work.
Through the communications approach, the RCS seeks to enhance students’ cognitive
development. Herbert Simon points out that the basic principle of the enterprise of cognitive
studies is that “learning takes place inside the learner and only inside the learner”.12 However,
Simon also recognizes that “whether from books or people, at least 90% of what we have in our
heads . . . is acquired by social processes, including watching others, listening to them, and
reading their writings”. The RCS takes into account this socially distributed nature of learning
by building an optimal environment for research learning to occur. The learners’ knowledge
construction process is aided by an environment of distributed cognition in which participants at
all levels—experts, mentors, accomplished novices, and novices—teach and learn from each
other.4 The RCS addresses the development of communications abilities in a system of
distributed cognition.
Survey results of RCS participants are presented to provide an example of a way to incorporate
complex systems study into the existing undergraduate engineering curriculum. Complex
systems study is defined as a new field of science that studies the collective behavior of a system
and how this system interacts with its environment. Complex systems study is laying the
foundation for a revolution of all sciences to move beyond reductionism into holism.7 The
undergraduate RCS students are forced to move from reductionistic thinking into holistic
thinking.
They must explain their research to students in different research groups, to students from
different engineering disciplines, to an engineering mentor, to a linguistics graduate student, and
to an English professor. By communicating their research to this varied audience, the students
are forced to think about how their research fits in the ‘bigger picture.’
A method for determining whether the undergraduate students have become better
communicators and complex systems thinkers will be discussed. The first part of this method
involves pre- and post-semester surveys taken by the RCS students. The results of this survey indicate that students who participated in weekly RCS sessions are better complex systems
thinkers. This was demonstrated by the students’ perceptions of themselves as better
communicators after participation in the RCS. These findings are consistent with previous
findings.
AU  - Loralee Donath
AU  - Nadia Craig
AU  - Nancy Thompson
AU  - Michael Matthews
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2005/06/12
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Incorporating Complexity Into Undergraduate Engineering Development Through The Research Communications Studio
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/15392
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--15392
ER  -