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Using Let Me Learn® to Promote Metacognition and Foster Teaming Skills

Abstract The Sophomore Engineering Clinic at Rowan University is a course in technical writing and engineering design, team-taught by Communications and Engineering faculty. This fall sophomore course presents Rowan engineering students with their first exposure to open-ended design problems in a team setting. The current course features a four-week introductory project on bottle rocket design, completed in teams of 3-4, and a 10-week main project on crane design, completed in teams of 4-5. The teaming aspect of the course is a challenge to engineering students, particularly in that many of them are naturally pre-disposed to prefer working alone.

The Let Me Learn (LML) Process is an integrated approach to teaching and learning that starts with administration of the Learning Connections Inventory (LCI), a survey instrument that assesses individual learning patterns. All Rowan Students now take the LCI as entering freshmen. In this study, short in-class team problem solving exercises are being conducted in two of the six sections of the Fall 2007 offering of the course. The LML process is then being used to help students interpret their team’s behaviors and prepare strategies for effective teaming on the course’s long-term projects. This intervention started immediately after the 4-week bottle rocket project was completed.

This paper will describe the team-building activities and use several mechanisms to assess their effectiveness. The teams in the two LML sections will be compared to the other four sections through two instruments: performance on team deliverables and peer evaluations. In addition, the peer evaluations on the bottle rocket and crane projects will be compared to each other, to gauge how students’ effectiveness at working in teams was influenced by the team-building activities.

Introduction

A large body of research in engineering education has been devoted to the study of engineering student teams. Numerous published studies examine understanding the factors that shape the dynamics, interactions, and performance of teams, identifying pedagogical strategies and resources that improve team functioning, and developing methods of assessment to measure team skills1,2,3,4,5,6. Among the factors that have been studied are students’ learning processes, commonly measured using learning styles inventories such as the Meyers-Briggs7 and Felder89 inventories.

This study employs a particular instrument, the Learning Connections Inventory, and methodology, the Let Me Learn® process, for characterizing the individual learning processes of students. The Let Me Learn® (LML) process is a comprehensive strategy for building metacognitive awareness in students. LML differs from learning styles approaches in that learning styles typically identify the learner with a personality type or category rather than a profile reflecting degree of preference for multiple interacting patterns. Another key difference is that LML emphasizes the learner’s capacity to use his/her patterns consciously and strategically to adapt to different learning expectations, rather than merely seeking learning

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Dahm, K., & Harvey, R. (2008, June), Using Let Me Learn® To Promote Metacognition And Foster Teaming Skills Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4269