Pearl Chen

Moments of Joy

Abstract This study examined (a) the nature of student engagement (enjoyment, concentration, perceived control, exploration, and challenge) in four hypermedia design tasks: chunking, linking, naming paths, and organizing information, and (b) the impact of designing hypermedia documents on students’ conceptual learning. The findings showed a high degree of student engagement in organizing information, and a greater organization and elaboration of concepts in students’ final knowledge representations. Although there were individual differences in students’ cognitive engagement and conceptual learning, the highly motivating task of organizing information and the characteristics of the learning context sustained their engagement in cognitively complex and challenging tasks.

Enhancing collaborative project-based learning using participatory design approach

In this work-in-progress paper, an innovative curriculum design process using participatory design strategy is presented. The principle of participatory design is to involve the end users (which are the students in our case) in every stage of the design process. Guided by the theory of situated learning, the faculty and student co-designers re-examined the Collaborative Project-based Learning (CPBL) model based on the evidence collected to identify effective pedagogical components to address the learning needs of under-represented minority students. In the course redesign process, the faculty and students worked together to improve the pedagogical methods based on cognitive apprenticeship and its four building blocks including content, method, sequence, and sociology. The redesigned course is currently being offered in Spring 2014, where both qualitative and quantitative data are collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the course redesign. We expect to share both the course re-design process and what we learn from the implementation of the redesigned course with the broad engineering education community during the conference.