Background
Professional skills are critical in engineering practice. Differing definitions and lack of empirical evidence make it difficult to help students develop these skills.
Purpose
This ...research seeks to understand what it means to have professional skills in an industrially situated capstone project and, by extension, in engineering. We also aim to demonstrate the influence on those skills of the feedback provided to students.
Design/Method
Our ethnographic study employs discourse analysis to focus on professional skills. Using the construct of communities of practice, we describe and analyze conversations between a coach and four student teams as the coach provided feedback, and conversations among students as they worked in teams.
Results
Approximately half the discussion addressed the following professional skills: communication, documentation, teamwork, the economic impact of engineering solutions, and project management. Development of professional skills promotes students' enculturation into both a disciplinary community (chemical engineering) and an industrial community (semiconductor industry). Feedback on professional skills generally was given in the context of technical aspects, and we found an interplay between the teams' participation in professional skills activities and participation in more technical activities.
Conclusions
Participation in engineering design projects provides students opportunities to practice both professional and technical skills. Feedback on professional skills helps students recognize how to simultaneously represent themselves as legitimate members of multiple communities of practice.
This paper describes the "AIChE Concept Warehouse," a recently developed web-based instructional tool that enables faculty within the discipline of chemical engineering to better provide their ...students concept-based instruction. It currently houses over 2,000 concept questions and 10 concept inventories pertinent to courses throughout the core chemical engineering curriculum. These questions are available for faculty use both as in-class concept-based clicker questions (or ConcepTests) and stand-alone concept inventories, and can be accessed in various formats (online or offline) for use in class and on assignments and exams. The design philosophy is to make the tool versatile so that it can be used in the way that best fits with the instructor's teaching philosophy and the program's educational environment. Instructors and students perceive it to catalyze engagement and promote learning. While domain specificity is critical to the targeted development of tools like the one we describe, we argue that the computer-based approach is generic and could be applied to any engineering discipline. One objective in describing this tool and characterizing our experiences using it is to contribute to such wider adaptation.
This paper is intended for engineering educators, high school curriculum designers, and high school teachers interested in integrating authentic, project-based learning experiences into their ...classes. These types of projects may appear complex, but have many advantages. We characterize the successful implementation of one such project, the "Virtual Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Laboratory Project," in five high schools. Central to the project is a virtual laboratory that simulates a manufacturing process in the integrated circuits industry. It provides opportunities for students to develop and refine solutions to an authentic engineering task through integration of science knowledge, experimentation, analysis, reflection, and iteration. The flexibility in instructional design and the robust, no-cost access enables versatility. The authenticity of the project is shown both to motivate students and develop their epistemological beliefs. The project is also shown to promote student cognition through knowledge integration, engineering design strategies, and evaluation and reflection. In addition, the project allows for teacher assessment of students' progress towards this type of cognition and enables them to identify opportunities to modify their instructional design to promote learning. Finally, we discuss potential barriers to adoption.
LEARNING PROFESSIONAL SKILLS Gilbuena, Debra M; Koretsky, Milo D
ASEE prism,
02/2015, Letnik:
24, Številka:
6
Journal Article
In this study, approximately half the discussion between the coach and the student teams addressed professional skills, which included communication, documentation, teamwork, the economic impact of ...engineering solutions, and project management. If educators focus solely on disciplinary community activities and do not acknowledge industry-specific aspects, some students who have had internships or other experiences interacting with practicing engineers may focus on the differences between academics and the "real world" and not connect what they learn in class to applications in industry.
Propagation is a widespread goal of education materials development. If an educational innovation is effective in one environment, many developers want to share it with other instructors and ...institutions to have a larger impact and improve education more broadly. Studying the propagation process is one way to learn more about the aspects that contribute to propagation of particular educational innovations and aspects that hinder propagation. We report on the early stages of propagation of the Concept Warehouse (CW), a database-driven website developed to support the chemical engineering education community's use of concept-based pedagogies. We hope to inform other developers as well as learn how we can further support propagation of this innovation. Specifically we focus on the propagation strategies used by the developers of the tool and how these strategies have changed over time. We found that the developers focused heavily on creating a network and used workshops as one strategy towards that end. However, not all workshops appeared to have the same effectiveness. Workshops deemed most effective by the developers were those that tied into already existing community networks where the CW portion was part of a longer (multiple day) workshop focused on pedagogy and instruction. Finally, we provide a section with the developers' advice to others who may be considering propagating educational innovations.
A comparative case study examined two teams for instances of Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE) as they completed a complex, virtual process development project. Discourse from team meetings ...was analyzed to interpret how engagement unfolds, specifically classifying engagement in two dimensions: School vs. Engineering World, and task co-production vs. knowledge co-construction. Teams were found to move back and forth between School World and Engineering World as different aspects of the learning system become salient and instances of PDE were triggered when teams experienced productive frictions from interlocking components of the learning system.
Many engineering programs have recently seen a significant increase in enrollment and educators have turned to alternative teaching strategies to help cope with this increase. One such approach is to ...incorporate Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) led studios to complement lectures. We studied a chemical engineering department that has implemented a studio approach that provides students an interactive learning environment. In this exploratory qualitative study we interview Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and instructors to investigate their perceptions of the implementation of studios relative to the designers objective and their teaching experiences. From the latter, we infer epistemological frames based on their responses to: how they prepare for class as a student, how they prepare for class as a teacher, and how they deliver the studio content.
Developing and using models is an important skill employed by practicing engineers that is difficult to cultivate in students. One way to help students develop modeling capability is through ...feedback. Feedback has been shown to be effective in helping students close the gap between actual and desired performance. This case study investigates the effect of feedback on student teams' use of models in a three-week, open-ended, process development project in which students conducted experiments using a virtual laboratory. Feedback took place during meetings with an expert coach, termed coaching sessions. Coaching sessions of four teams were found to include a substantial amount of model-related feedback. In addition, an in-depth exploration of a single team provides insight into the impact of both directive and facilitative feedback on student modeling behavior.
The Virtual Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Process Development Project provides the context for the two areas of the research presented in this dissertation. The first area, generally referred to as ...feedback in this dissertation, focuses on student learning and the interactions of students and instructors that take place in the project, specifically focused on characterizing feedback and determining the influence of feedback as student teams progress towards completing the project. The characteristics of feedback found in this project are presented within a situative perspective using the analytical framework of episodes. The characteristics include: a list and categorization of episode themes, the structure and flow of episodes during the coaching session, the sub-structure present within individual episodes, and the types of feedback present. This dissertation shows how these characteristics frame participation in a community of practice and can be used as tools to scaffold instructor feedback in project-based learning. Episodes analysis is also used to investigate how feedback on professional skills can help to enculturate students into a community of practice and influence their fluency with professional skills and engagement in more technical activities. The second area examines the spread of this innovative project from its home institution to other institutions. In this area an analysis of the spread of the Virtual CVD Process Development Project in the high school setting is presented. The project was found to provide versatility for instructors and afford student learning in the areas of motivation, cognition, and epistemological beliefs. These two areas inform each other. As the project is assessed at different institutions, it is continually improved and the sensitivity of different aspects of the project is explored, e.g., the aspects of the project that are crucial to maintain effectiveness are identified. One of these aspects is the feedback that takes place in the project. As the project is further examined at the home institution in depth, more can be learned about the best ways it can be delivered. This information informs scaffolding that then can be provided to faculty at other institutions such that they can attend to crucial aspects of the project in the most efficient, effective manner, improving not only the probability of successful adaptation, but also the likelihood that the project will further diffuse to other institutions. The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.
