Portland, Oregon
June 23, 2024
June 23, 2024
June 26, 2024
New Engineering Educators Division (NEE)
24
10.18260/1-2--48153
https://peer.asee.org/48153
32
Timothy A Wood is an Associate Professor in the Dr. Emmett I. Davis, Jr. ’50, Department of
Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering at The Citadel. He acquired a Bachelor's in Engineering Physics Summa Cum Laude with Honors followed by Civil Engineering Master's and Doctoral degrees from Texas Tech University. His technical research focuses on structural evaluation of buried bridges and culverts. He encourages students through an infectious enthusiasm for engineering mechanics and self-directed, lifelong learning. He aims to recover the benefits of the classical model for civil engineering education through an emphasis on reading and other autodidactic practices.
Stephanie Laughton is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel, The Military
College of South Carolina. She acquired a Bachelor's in Civil & Environmental Engineering with Honors from Duke
University followed by Master's and Doctoral degrees in the same field from Carnegie Mellon University.
Laughton’s research interests include engineering education and pedagogy, sustainability education, and
environmental nanotechnology.
Innovative engineers depend on technical reading as a primary means of lifelong learning. Several scaffolded course activities encourage the practice of reading and notetaking in a collaborative learning environment. In lower-level courses, students receive brief instruction in How to Read a Book[1], Cornell notes[2], and Sketchnoting[3]. Student Note assignments require students to take hand-written notes while reading the textbook and post a picture of their reading and class notes to an online discussion board. In later courses, students, well trained in the Student Notes methodology, tackle a more advanced textbook through guided reading activities before class. Though Reading Notes Quizzes proved an unacceptable tax on student-faculty rapport, Group Notes and Student Board Notes show much more promise. In upper-level courses, faculty provided a list of questions connected to specific sections of an advanced textbook. In a third-year course, Group Notes assignments require students to generate answers in groups of two or three and upload a scan of their answers ahead of lecture. In the fourth-year course, the Student Board Notes assignments require students to copy their notes for a specific question onto the board which the faculty then use to facilitate a “just-in-time” clarification of content before application in example problems. Student responses indicate a generally positive outlook on many of these reading and notetaking assignments. Faculty appreciate students who engage with the material before class. Students learn how to expand their understanding through reading even as they gain required technical knowledge.
Wood, T. A., & Laughton, S. (2024, June), There's a Textbook for this Class? Scaffolding Reading and Note-taking in a Digital Age Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--48153
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