Ann F. McKenna

Characterizing engineering faculty's teaching approaches

In this paper, we identify several approaches engineering faculty use to teach engineering topics. We report results from an exploratory study, consisting of 16 faculty interviews from five diverse institutions of higher education. We focus specifically on engineering faculty because the engineering faculty teaching culture is not well explored, even though there are many ongoing projects to reform engineering education. The results from this study contribute to efforts currently underway to improve teaching and learning in engineering education, as well as in higher education. Results from this study highlight the disciplinary nature of teaching in the engineering domain. Furthermore, our results can serve as a foundation to compare teaching approaches in other disciplines, or to potential changes in engineering teaching practices.

Exploring the Impact of Virtual and Physical Dissection Activities on Students’ Understanding of Engineering Design Principles

Product dissection has become a popular pedagogy for actively engaging engineering students in the classroom through practical hands-on experiences. Despite its numerous advantages, dissection of physical products has many drawbacks, including not only the costs required to start-up and maintain such activities but also the workspace and storage space needed for the products and tools used to dissect them. This paper presents results from on-going research that is investigating the extent to which dissection of virtual representations of products — what we refer to as virtual dissection — can be used in lieu of physical product dissection in the classroom. In particular, we found positive learning gains in students’ ability to identify and describe the function and production method of components contained in a hand-held power drill, for both physical and virtual dissection groups. However, the data also reveal differences in the overall maximum level attained as well as differences in the range and types of components identified between the groups. While we recognize that virtual dissection will never provide the same hands-on experiences as physical dissection, we contend that virtual dissection can be used effectively in the classroom to increase students’ understanding of engineering design principles. By substantiating this impact, we can help establish cost-effective sets of computer-based dissection activities that do not require extensive workspace and storage spaces and can be easily scaled to any size classroom.© 2008 ASME

Capturing student's teamwork and open-ended design performance in an undergraduate multimedia engineering design class

The present work describes the authors experiences capturing student performance in the freshman design class ME39C: Multimedia Case Studies of Engineering Design, at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. The focus of the ME39C class is to facilitate students as they work in teams to develop an original web based multimedia case study of an engineering design. The paper emphasizes a qualitative approach to capturing student performance and focuses on the process of teamwork and the interaction among students. They used a series of different methods to triangulate, compare and evaluate student performance. Specifically, they used an original web-based discussion tool, student observations and interviews, and questionnaires. Initial findings revealed that information obtained by one method sometimes contradicted data obtained from another. These contradictions suggest caution when analyzing student performance based on just one point of view. The data also indicates that team work, both in terms of product and process, can and should be collected continuously throughout the semester in order to provide the necessary feedback essential to student learning and improvement. Using a variety of assessment techniques affords a more comprehensive analysis of student performance.

Designing discovery experience for big data interaction: a case of web-based knowledge mining and interactive visualization platform

The exponentially growing data in every aspect of human lives is offering both opportunities to gain unprecedented insights and challenges for designing efficient discovery experiences. To respond to the challenge of dealing with big data, our work is designing a web-based, knowledge mining and interactive visualization platform that allows users to interactively synthesize, mine, and visualize large-scale data. In this paper, we extend the classic information retrieval concept of information seeking to more general insight discovery behavior. Our approach is to focus on users insight discovery workflow rather than data per se. User interviews were conducted to extract workflows and specific requirements to inform and direct design decisions.

Navigating the Barriers to Interdisciplinary Design Education: Lessons Learned From the NSF Design Workshop Series

Evidence suggests that transformational innovation occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines rather than isolated within them. Design—being both pervasive and inherently interdisciplinary—has the power to transcend many disciplines and help break down the departmental “silos” that hinder such collaborative efforts. Many universities are now struggling to embrace the curricular innovations that are necessary to achieve and sustain interdisciplinary education. Given the already packed undergraduate engineering curricula, several universities have started to offer new design programs that span several disciplines at the masters and doctoral levels. In this paper, we examine the five interdisciplinary graduate design programs offered by three different universities—University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Stanford University—that hosted the NSF Design Workshop Series in 2008–2009. Collectively, these programs represent “solutions” that span a variety of graduate degree offerings that are available and provide examples of ways to successfully navigate the barriers and hurdles to interdisciplinary design education. A recap of the NSF Design Workshop Series is also provided along with recommendations from the workshops to foster discussion and provide directions for future work.Copyright

Innovation corps for learning: Evidence-based entrepreneurship™ to improve (STEM) education

The Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L) is a pilot initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) to study whether the NSF I-Corps model can help to propagate and scale educational innovations. The NSF I-Corps guides teams based on established strategies for business start-ups, using Blanks Lean LaunchPad and Osterwalders Business Model Canvas and associated tools, to build entrepreneurial skills that will encourage mainstream application of their emerging technologies. The overriding goal is improving student learning and success rates in key STEM courses by helping to accelerate the process of bringing effective educational innovations to scale. The project goal of I-Corps-L is to investigate the potential of the I-Corps model for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community to impact the way innovations are designed and implemented. This Work in Progress describes the features of the I-Corps-L pilot and provides preliminary indications of its applicability for propagating, scaling and sustaining education innovations. Addressing the persistent challenge in STEM education to adopt evidence-based instructional practices is an urgent need as many approaches have been tried yet the rate and extent of adoption are very low.

Portfolio Mining

Portfolio mining facilitates the creation of actionable knowledge, catalyzes innovations, and sustains research communities.

Using product archaeology to embed context in engineering design

Many engineering departments often struggle with meeting “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (outcome h) that is required by ABET. The already packed curricula provide few opportunities to offer meaningful experiences to address this outcome, and most departments relegate this requirement to an early cornerstone or later capstone design experience as a result, making these courses an ineffective “catch all” for many ABET requirements. We address this issue by using the paradigm of product archaeology, defined as the process of reconstructing the lifecycle of a product — the customer requirements, design specifications, and manufacturing processes used to produce it — to understand the decisions that led to its development. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, we embed context as a central component in developing design solutions. Specifically, in our work we have implemented several approaches to integrate contextual thinking into a senior level engineering design course. Following Kolb’s model of experiential learning and an instructional framework adapted for product archaeology (inclusive of evaluate-explain-prepare-excavate activities) we have restructured the course to embed specific and targeted reflection, dissection, and analysis activities so that students teams effectively address the global, economic, environmental, and societal factors in their design solutions. This paper provides the theoretical framework of our instructional approach, describes the specific instructional activities we implemented, and results from our pre and post survey assessments that describe the impact on students’ understanding of contextual as well engineering design topics.Copyright

EXPLORING ADAPTIVE EXPERTISE AS A TARGET FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION

In this paper we present the concept of adaptive expertise and relate this concept to the design curriculum offered by the Institute for Design Engineering and Applications (IDEA) at Northwestern University. The model of adaptive expertise suggests that instruction and assessment include a balance of “efficiency” and “innovation”. These two dimensions are first described from a theoretical perspective, then are discussed in more concrete terms in the context of the design experiences provided in IDEA. The model of adaptive expertise suggests that by providing learning experiences that balance these two dimensions we better prepare students to flexibly apply their knowledge in innovative ways. Since these aims are so closely aligned with the goals of design, we offer adaptive expertise as the target for engineering design education.Copyright

The use of engineering design scenarios to assess student knowledge of global, societal, economic, and environmental contexts

Product archaeology as an educational approach asks engineering students to consider and explore the broader societal and global impacts of a products manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal on people, economics, and the environment. This study examined the impact of product archaeology in a project-based engineering design course on student attitudes and perceptions about engineering and abilities to extend and refine knowledge about broader contexts. Two design scenarios were created: one related to dental hygiene and one related to vaccination delivery. Design scenarios were used to (1) assess knowledge of broader contexts, and (2) test variability of student responses across different contextual situations. Results from pre- to post-surveying revealed improved student perceptions of knowledge of broader contexts. Significant differences were observed between the two design scenarios. The findings support the assumption that different design scenarios elicit consideration of different contexts and design scenarios can be constructed to target specific contextual considerations.