Lande, M., & Larson, A., & Alumbaugh, B. (2022, August), Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41646

\bibitem{asee_peer_41646}
  Lande, M., \& Larson, A., \& Alumbaugh, B. (2022, August), \emph{Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses}
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
  10.18260/1-2--41646

Micah Lande, Adrianna Larson, and Brian Alumbaugh.  "Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses".  2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/41646 Internet.  05 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_41646}
  Micah Lande, Adrianna Larson, and Brian Alumbaugh.
  "Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/41646 Internet.  05 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_41646
author = "Micah Lande, Adrianna Larson, and Brian Alumbaugh"
title = "Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses"
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2022"
month = "August"
address = "Minneapolis, MN"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/41646}
number = {10.18260/1-2--41646}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Undergraduate mechanical engineering education consists of a broad set of topic areas balanced across the curriculum. Many course topics are taught by multiple instructors and the veracity of the technical content taught and the variety of pedagogical approaches by each faculty may make it less than clear to students as to the connections among and across classes and topic areas. Curricula generally balance introductory cornerstone courses, capstone design courses, and mezzanine engineering fundamentals and engineering depth coursework. The technical depth, especially in mechanical engineering, is spread across the sophomore engineering fundamentals and upper-level depth courses, with many pre-requisite chains of courses covering the multiple breadths. 

At [university] our classes (and faculty research areas) are organized around Design & Manufacturing/Systems Engineering, Dynamic Systems & Controls/Robotics, Solid Mechanics, and Thermal & Fluid Science. This paper will explore how this technical content is organized within a course, cross-sectionality across courses taken at the same time (as projected in our program of study maps), and longitudinally from 1st to senior year in the curriculum. How pedagogy is implemented both cross-sectionally and longitudinally is also of interest, particularly in the fundamentals and depth courses. To triangulate perspectives on the mechanical engineering curriculum, and to provide some additional qualitative takes, instructors, 1st year students, and 4th year students, and alumni in industry will all be interviewed with semi-structured interviews about their view of the structure of the mechanical engineering curriculum, and awareness of, and appraise connections across topic areas. It is supposed that both faculty and alumni will have a comprehensive perspective on the coursework while 1st year students will have a much more piecemeal set of conceptions. 4th students may vary depending on their own exposure to the professional practice of mechanical engineering through co-ops an internships. This work builds on the authors’ prior work to understand the evolution of one’s design process mental models from 1st to senior year. 

Additional information about specific classes will be obtained by documentation analysis of course descriptions, shared (or mismatched) learning goals across multiple sections from course syllabi, and making some appraisal of learning goals statements using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a categorization of some framework of hierarchy of learning activities.

There may be some implications of this paper to inform how our academic unit communicates the structure and organization of our expected knowledge accumulation and application and practice thereof. There also may be some amount of expert blindness of the collective faculty with some assumption about how learning experiences connect and build on each other; one that may not be as immediately evident to students, or even prospective students. It is hoped that this class-level granularity can help better illustrate what and how mechanical engineering undergraduate students learn and in what order.

AU  - Micah Lande
AU  - Adrianna Larson
AU  - Brian Alumbaugh
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Making Learning Goals More Apparent Across the Curriculum for  Mechanical Engineering Fundamentals and Depth Courses
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41646
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41646
ER  -