Portland, Oregon
June 23, 2024
June 23, 2024
July 12, 2024
Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) Technical Session - Effective Teaching 2
Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL)
https://peer.asee.org/47607
Julie Anne Wildschut is an assistant professor in the Engineering Department. She teaches undergraduate classes related to water resources, hydraulics, sustainability, and environmental engineering. Her research interests include stream stabilization to reduce sedimentation, improving access to clean drinking water, reducing human impacts to waterways, and designing a more sustainable built environment.
The most important goal of teaching is student learning, passing on information from the instructor to the student so they can apply those concepts and skills months and years after instruction. However, this goal is not easily accomplished. Thinking and learning take significant effort and students often resist putting in the required work. Additionally, the increasingly diverse student population and recent disruptions to traditional classroom learning require instructional design to meet learning outcomes. Three evidence-based teaching practices including retrieval practice, spaced (distributed) practice, and interleaving were incorporated into a hydraulics course to improve student learning and evaluated for their effectiveness. This paper describes the practices, how they were employed within an engineering course, and evaluates their success using data as available and student feedback. Of the three practices, students indicated retrieval practice as the most effective as 89% of respondents used classroom retrieval practices to adjust their study and preparation for tests and 67% thought retrieval practice would help them remember concepts past this course. Quantitative support of student learning (in the form of test grades) was not significant. Spaced practice outperformed student expectations and was perceived as helpful for chapter test preparation while interleaving was moderately incorporated into the course with low perceived impact.
Wildschut, J. A. (2024, June), Incorporating Evidence-based Teaching Practices in an Engineering Course to Improve Learning Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47607
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