Thomas, R., & Appelhans, S., & Thompson, S., & Thomas, S., & Nickel, R. M., & Cheville, R. A., & Kozick, R. J., & Matlack, C., & Asare, P. (2023, June), Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?  Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44195

\bibitem{asee_peer_44195}
  Thomas, R., \& Appelhans, S., \& Thompson, S., \& Thomas, S., \& Nickel, R. M., \& Cheville, R. A., \& Kozick, R. J., \& Matlack, C., \& Asare, P. (2023, June), \emph{Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?}
  Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland.
  10.18260/1-2--44195

Rebecca Thomas, Sarah Appelhans, Stu Thompson, Stewart Thomas, Robert M. Nickel, R.  Alan Cheville, Richard J. Kozick, Christa Matlack, and Philip Asare.  "Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?".  2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland, 2023, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2023.  https://peer.asee.org/44195 Internet.  15 May, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_44195}
  Rebecca Thomas, Sarah Appelhans, Stu Thompson, Stewart Thomas, Robert M. Nickel, R.  Alan Cheville, Richard J. Kozick, Christa Matlack, and Philip Asare.
  "Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?".
  \emph{2023 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland, 2023, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2023.
  https://peer.asee.org/44195 Internet.  15 May, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_44195
author = "Rebecca Thomas, Sarah Appelhans, Stu Thompson, Stewart Thomas, Robert M. Nickel, R.  Alan Cheville, Richard J. Kozick, Christa Matlack, and Philip Asare"
title = "Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?"
booktitle = "2023 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2023"
month = "June"
address = "Baltimore , Maryland"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/44195}
number = {10.18260/1-2--44195}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - This Work in Progress paper will assess the impact of an ePortfolio experience provided in a first-year course on students as they continue throughout an electrical and computer engineering curriculum. Many institutions are investigating the use of ePortfolios and other reflective assignments as student learning tools. Our department has adopted ePortfolios as a key component of our NSF grant due to the demonstrated linkage between reflective activities and metacognition and the subsequent ability to retain and transfer course material [1]. The portfolios will also encourage students to use narrative to reframe their experiences and cultivate their identities as engineers. Professors developed ePortfolio assignments in a first-year design course to give students a space to reflect on their potential career paths and envision themselves as future engineers. We have been curious about the impact this experience might have on students’ reflective thinking as they continue through the program. Do student ePortfolios in a first-year design course promote better reflection in subsequent technical courses?
Electrical and computer engineering students (N=28) at a liberal arts university completed an ePortfolio assignment to explore the discipline during their first-year design course. From this experimental group, we collected samples of lab reports students wrote during their sophomore year courses. As a control group, lab reports from students the previous year who had not completed the ePortfolio activity were compared. Inductive methods were used to generate a codebook from a small sample of lab reports (N=8) from both the control and experimental groups looking for evidence of reflective thinking. Using the codebook, multiple members of our team coded the remaining reports and checked for intercoder reliability. We provide a quantitative summary of reflective thinking in the control and experimental groups.
We discovered that students that had the ePortfolio experience in their first-year were more reflective thinkers in their second-year. This is an important finding because reflection is an indicator of metacognition, which improves students’ ability to retain and recall information. If students develop habits of reflective thinking, we expect their ability to retain core engineering concepts throughout the curriculum will increase. Our future plans are to expand ePortfolio usage to all design courses as well as some core courses throughout the curriculum. 

AU  - Rebecca Thomas
AU  - Sarah Appelhans
AU  - Stu Thompson
AU  - Stewart Thomas
AU  - Robert M. Nickel
AU  - R.  Alan Cheville
AU  - Richard J. Kozick
AU  - Christa Matlack
AU  - Philip Asare
CY  - Baltimore , Maryland
DA  - 2023/06/25
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Work in Progress: Cultivating Reflective Engineers: Does providing a reflective ePortfolio experience in a first-year design course lead students to be more reflective in later courses?
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/44195
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--44195
ER  -