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Education literature has long emphasized the compounding benefits of reflective practice. Although reflection has largely been used as a tool for developing writing skills, contemporary research has explored its contributions to other disciplines including professional occupations such as nursing, teaching and engineering. Reflective assignments encourage engineering students to think critically about the impact engineers can and should have in the global community and their future role in engineering. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at a small liberal arts college adopted ePortfolios in a first-year design course to encourage students to reframe their experiences and cultivate their identities as engineers. Our recent work demonstrated that students who create ePortfolios cultivate habits of reflective thinking that continue in subsequent courses within our program’s design sequence. However, student ability to transfer reflective habits across domains has remained unclear and encouraging critical engagement beyond the focused scope of technical content within more traditional core engineering courses is often difficult. In this work, we analyze students’ ability to transfer habits of reflective thinking across domains from courses within a designfocused course sequence to technical content-focused courses within a degree program. Extending reflection into core courses in a curriculum is important for several reasons. First, it stimulates metacognition which enables students to transfer content to future courses. Second, it builds students’ ability to think critically about technical subject matter. And third, it contributes to the ongoing development of their identities as engineers. Particularly for students traditionally underrepresented in engineering, the ability to integrate prior experiences and interests into one’s evolving engineering identity may lead to better retention and sense of belonging in the profession. In the first-year design course, electrical and computer engineering students (N=28) at a liberal arts university completed an ePortfolio assignment to explore the discipline. Using a combination of inductive and deductive coding techniques, multiple members of our team coded student reports and checked for intercoder reliability. Previously, we found that students’ reflection dramatically improved in the second-year design course [1]. Drawing upon Hatton and Smith’s (1995) categorizations of reflective thinking [2], we observed that students were particularly proficient in Dialogic Reflection, or reflection that relates to their own histories, interests, and experiences. In this paper, we compare the quality of student reflections in the second-year design course with those in a second-year required technical course to discover if reflective capabilities have transferred into a technical domain. We discovered that students are able to transfer reflective thinking across different types of courses, including those emphasizing technical content, after a single ePortfolio activity. Furthermore, we identified a similar pattern of improvement most notably in Dialogic Reflection. This finding indicates that students are developing sustained habits of reflective thinking. As a result, we anticipate an increase in their ability to retain core engineering concepts throughout the curriculum. Our future plans are to expand ePortfolio usage to all design courses as well as some
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The “Soft” Argument for Engineering Professional Identity Courses: A Case Study
Introduction The increasing demands for a 21st century postsecondary education-- that incorporates the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences--in contrast to the stasis of engineering curriculum, has catalyzed an engineering education “identity crisis” [1]-[9]. Without an understanding of the engineering norms, practices, and worldviews that engineering students and instructors carry from their courses, there is an increased risk that underrepresentation in engineering will continue to persist. This work aims to expand a previously developed study on engineering professional identity by exploring two unique engineering courses (serving as case studies) at a college of engineering at a western institution in the U.S. One course focused on helping engineering students develop technical communication skills while the other course aimed to help underrepresented women in engineering to understand about and plan for careers in engineering. Both cases are uniquely positioned to help engineering education researchers elucidate how professionally-focused and career-planning engineering courses could guide students’ perceptions about engineering.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1664274
- PAR ID:
- 10087317
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Educational Research Association
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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