Search

In the summer Research Experience for Undergraduates offered by the NSF-sponsored VaNTH Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering, core competency instruction in ethics and communication was integrated into students' research experiences outside of formal courses. This paper describes our instructional approach and presents an initial evaluation of its effectiveness. A simple concept mapping assessment used at the beginning and end of the summer suggests that students made gains in both areas. In ethics, students developed greater awareness of key concepts, such as respect for persons (informed consent), beneficence, justice, and integrity. Gains in communication were more modest, but the maps revealed growth in understanding the importance of audience and the multifaceted nature of technical communication. Overall, the study suggests that students can make measurable strides in core competencies without taking formal courses. Future research should consider integrating components of our intervention into other non-credit experiences for engineering undergraduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering programs must assess students' abilities to master "criteria 3 a-k." Skills such as teamwork, problem solving, design, and ethical understanding entail learning various processes; hence, assessing these outcomes is better accomplished by focusing on the process rather than the result. Methods for observing students' performance, such as 100 percent behavioral observation, are ideal but expensive. We extend work sampling, an economic industry-based alternative, to observe cognitive and behavioral processes. Specifically, we describe a work sampling methodology to assess students engaged in teamwork. We then determine attributes of teamwork, establish target time proportions using 100 percent observation, and statistically compare the targets to proportions obtained from work sampling intervals to determine the effective interval. The robustness of work sampling is tested in four learning environments. Results indicate that sampling provides a statistically valid alternative for assessing teamwork. However, when observing design and ethical understanding processes, additional research is needed to make work sampling viable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual and procedural knowledge are two mutually-supportive factors associated with the development of engineering skill. The present study extends previous work on undergraduate learning in engineering to provide further validation for an assessment paradigm capable of quantifying engineering students' conceptual and problem-solving knowledge. Eight students who were enrolled in an introductory thermodynamics course and four who were enrolled in the course sequel provided verbal protocol data as they used instructional software. They were compared to existing data from a cohort of eleven science and engineering majors who had not taken thermodynamics. The results replicated earlier findings showing more cognitive activity on computer screens requiring overt user interaction compared to text-based screens. The data also indicated that higher-versus lower-performing students, based on course grades, engaged in more higher-order cognitive processing. There was no evidence that students gained deeper cognitive processing as they advanced through the engineering curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualizing concurrent engineering is an easy task for students, usually. However, they find it difficult to understand the forces preventing concurrent engineering from being supported. In fact, concurrent engineering can seem like common sense, until students experience this exercise. After the exercise, students often have a much greater appreciation for the difficulties and the degree of advantage posed by the use of concurrent engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]