Devlin Montfort

Embedded Knowledge in Transportation Engineering: Comparisons between Engineers and Instructors

AbstractSubstantial research in a diversity of fields suggests that being successful in a skilled profession requires ways of thinking that are unique to the context of that profession and present in practitioners of that field. The purpose of this study is to characterize embedded knowledge of sight distance and stopping sight distance in instructors and engineers and similarly examine course materials. Individual interviews were conducted with 29 transportation engineers and 19 transportation instructors. Course notes from a selection of instructors and three commonly used textbooks were also analyzed. Although instructors and practitioners expressed similar content knowledge, there were significant differences in the context in which it was embedded. Engineering practitioners used and referred to software, manuals, and specific experiences, while instructors primarily spoke in a more abstract context or referred to textbooks. Also, engineers discussed methods of mitigating for the inability to meet min...

Secondary Students' Conceptual Understanding of Engineering as a Field.

Researchers have long been interested in how to recruit and retain more and more diverse students into engineering programs. One consistent challenge in this research is understanding the impacts of interventions from the point of view of the student, and how their preconceptions may influence that effectiveness. This study investigated how secondary students understand the concept of engineering, including what engineering is and what engineers do. The purpose of this work was to describe students’ conceptions of engineering, and to determine how those perceptions relate to student interest in engineering careers. The investigation was founded on the theoretical framework of conceptual ecology. Students from one high school that are typically underrepresented demographically in engineering programs were interviewed about their perspective on engineering. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the constant comparative and thematic analysis methods. Students who were interested in pursuing an engineering career generally believed that it involved hands-on building or fixing of cars, bridges, or airplanes. Students who were not interested in a career in engineering discussed a broader variety of types of engineering, and more often cited altruism and inherent interest as reasons that others would pursue such careers. Most students in this study did not express very complex or rich conceptions of engineers or engineering, but their conceptual ecologies suggest that they would be resistant to changing these conceptions. This suggests that recruitment and retention programs will need to directly address students’ existing conceptions of engineering.

Effectiveness of an Interactive Learning Environment Utilizing a Physical Model

AbstractThe goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a physical desktop learning module and associated activities and assessments (DLM&A) implemented in an undergraduate engineering class. Preassessments and postassessments designed as part of this study were implemented within a control group that participated in 11 interactive lecture sessions covering open channel flow, and an experimental group that participated in nine lectures and two 50-minute sessions with the DLM&A. Student responses on assessments provide strong evidence to suggest students’ conceptual understanding increased significantly when the DLM&A is implemented. The experimental group registered a gain of 0.57 out of 1.0 possible, with 70% of the students achieving minimum competency, compared to a respective 0.26 gain and 39% competency for the control group. The average effect size for the experimental group was d=0.98. Qualitative assessments show experimental group students were much more likely to correct their concept...

Work in progress: Do students need to learn to speak "Engineering-ese?" conceptual change as language acquisition in engineering

Conceptual change is often approached with a concrete epistemology in which students must replace their misconceptions with correct conceptions. Drawing upon the literature and our research, we propose that we need a new, discursive epistemology that describes conceptual change as language acquisition.

Squaring Philosophy of Engineering Through Personal Epistemologies Research

In comparison to scholarship on scientists’ epistemologies and ways of knowing, scholarship on engineers’ epistemologies and ways of knowing is scarce. Our project is unique in that it is based on interview data specifically asking engineers about their personal epistemologies. Rather than developing a normative philosophy of engineering, or making claims about an “engineering epistemology” writ large, our work explores the personal epistemologies of individual engineers. Personal epistemology is a concept from social science fields that has not yet been explored by philosophers of engineering. Borrowing language from Quine, we refer to the aligning of conceptual/philosophical and empirical/experiential perspectives as “squaring.” This chapter first presents an overview of the concept of personal epistemology, highlighting the most important themes and debates that surround it. We then describe the project that led us to the 2014 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET). Following that, we identify and discuss several reasons why philosophers of engineering should engage with the concept of personal epistemologies. We conclude with a discussion of five challenges encountered in this project. It is our hope that these discussions ultimately contribute not only to an empirically-grounded philosophy of engineering, but also to an understanding of the messy realities entailed when venturing beyond normative disciplinary silos.

Epistemological frames of graduate teaching assistants and instructors in studio-based engineering classes

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.