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1. Reflecting on Culture in an Immersion Experience: How to Prepare Students for the Unexpected

   Fiss, L.; Slade, D. (August 2022, American Society for Engineering Education, 2022 conference.)

   Experiential learning is increasingly recognized as a high-impact educational practice, and reflection is an essential piece of consolidating learning from experiences, as many models of service learning and other experiential learning note. This paper addresses the mechanics of assigning reflection, with an emphasis on assignment structure. The prompt should be open-ended enough to allow students to bring elements of their experience that they may think don’t pertain to the subject at hand -- precisely because those moments are often where the greatest learning takes place. Drawing from years of experience with the Immersion Experience component of the Pavlis Honors College curriculum, this paper analyzes student reflections and offers suggestions about the structure of reflective assignments and their placement in curricula. 

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2. GIFTS: Making Research Experiences Meaningful through Critical Self-Reflection

   DeCrescenzo, Peter; Jangha, S. (June 2023, American Society of Engineering Education)

   In this Great Ideas for Teaching Students (GIFTS) paper, we offer learning outcomes that we are beginning to recognize from our eight-week research experience for undergraduates (REU). There are four characteristics that have been found to be essential to success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields: a strong sense of STEM identity, scientific self-efficacy, a sense of belonging, and a psychological sense of community. This is especially true for first-year and transfer students pursuing STEM undergraduate degrees. A variety of studies have been published that go into detail about why these characteristics in particular have such a significant effect on student performance and retention. This paper will present Critical Self-Reflection as a practical way to integrate development of these characteristics into student research experiences to foster experiential learning that goes beyond increasing technical skills. STEM students are not often trained to critically self-reflect on their experiences in classroom and research settings. An inability for undergraduates to reflect intentionally on their experiences creates greater risk for attrition from STEM disciplines. Curated reflective experiences in collaborative learning settings can offer professional development opportunities to enhance students’ social and technical communication skills. There are four phases within the scaffolded Critical Self-Reflection framework: Learning to Reflect, Reflection for Action, Reflection in Action, and Reflection on Action. When applying the evidence-based practice, STEM undergraduate researchers describe their perceptions via three activities: creating a legacy statement, participating in facilitated dialogue sessions, and writing curated reflection journal entries within an REU. Through critical self-reflection exercises, we are beginning to find growth of first-year and transfer STEM undergraduates in the following areas: understanding of their role in the lab; confidence in their researcher identity; expression of agency; observation and communication skills; and intentionality for action. Participating in this self-reflection allows students to make meaning of their experience enabling them to hone the aforementioned characteristics that creates a pathway from their undergraduate experience to undergraduate degree completion, graduate degree attainment, and to the STEM workforce. 

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3. An Exploration of Concept Mapping as a Reflective Approach for Instructors When Evaluating Problem Design Intent

   Olewnik, A.; Ferguson, S.; Sheikh, N.; Mariappan, A.; Schrewe, L. (January 2022, Proceedings ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition)

   Introduction: The work reported here subscribes to the idea that the best way to learn - and thus, improve student educational outcomes - is through solving problems, yet recognizes that engineering students are generally provided insufficient opportunities to engage problems as they will be engaged in practice. Attempts to incorporate more open-ended, ill-structured experiences have increased but are challenging for faculty to implement because there are no systematic methods or approaches that support the educator in designing these learning experiences. Instead, faculty often start from the anchor of domain-specific concepts, an anchoring that is further reinforced by available textbook problems that are rarely open in nature. Open-ended problems are then created in ad-hoc ways, and in doing so, the problem-solving experience is often not realized as the instructor intended. Approach: The focus in this work is the development and preliminary implementation of a reflective approach to support instructors in examining the design intent of problem experiences. The reflective method combines concept mapping as developed by Joseph Novak with the work of David Jonassen and his characterization of problems and the forms of knowledge required to solve them. Results: We report on the development of a standard approach – a template -- for concept mapping of problems. As a demonstration, we applied the approach to a relatively simple, well-structured problem used in an introductory aerospace engineering course. Educator-created concept maps provided a visual medium for examining the connectivity of problem elements and forms of knowledge. Educator reflection after looking at and discussing the concept map revealed ways in which the problem engagement may differ from the perceived design intent. Implications: We consider the potential for the proposed method to support design and facilitation activities in problem-based learning (PBL) environments. We explore broader implications of the approach as it relates to 1) facilitating a priori faculty insights regarding student navigation of problem solving, 2) instructor reflection on problem design and facilitation, and 3) supporting problem design and facilitation. Additionally, we highlight important issues to be further investigated toward quantifying the value and limitations of the proposed approach. 

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4. The case for metacognition support in a flipped STEM course

   https://doi.org/10.1177/03064190241255113  

   Clark, Renee_M; Guldiken, Rasim; Kaw, Autar; Uyanik, Ozge (May 2024, International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education)

   The metacognitive strategies of planning, monitoring, and evaluating can be promoted through systematic reflection to drive self-directed, lifelong learning. This article reports on a three-year study on systematic written reflection within an undergraduate Fluid Mechanics course to promote planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Students were prompted weekly to reflect on their in-class problem-solving, classroom and exam preparation, performance, behaviors, and learning in a flipped classroom at a large southeastern U.S. university. In addition, they received intentional instruction on how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their problem-solving during class. To enable a comparative assessment, a flipped classroom without these interventions was also implemented as a non-experimental cohort. The cohorts were compared using a final exam, concept inventory, and the Metacognitive Activities Inventory (MCAI). The MCAI indicated a significantly higher positive change (pre- to post-course) in self-regulatory behavior for the experimental cohort ( p = 0.037). The weekly reflections were studied using an inductive content analysis to assess students’ self-regulatory behaviors. They were also used to investigate statistical associations between reflection content and course outcomes. This revealed that academic self-discipline via planning, monitoring one's work, or being careful and diligent may be as aligned with course performance in STEM as is practice with the problem-solving itself. The effects for the final exam in the experimental cohort were positive overall as well as statistically or practically significant for various demographic strata. These results provided evidence for the potential enhancement of course performance with metacognition support. A positive shift in students’ perspectives regarding the value of the reflection questions was observed throughout the study. Therefore, as an implementation guide for other educators, the reflection questions and any changes made in posing them to students are discussed chronologically. Overall, the study points to the desirability of providing metacognition support in a STEM course. 

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5. A Reflection on Action Approach to Teamwork Facilitation

   Jaiswal, A.; Patel, D.; Zhu, Y.; Lee, J.; & Magana, A.J. (January 2022, ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   Working in teams has been recognized as an essential 21st-century skill. Introducing teamwork in the undergraduate classroom is crucial as it allows the students to work with individuals with diverse skillsets and learn from one another. It is important to note that just creating a team and allowing the students to work does not foster teamwork skills. Inculcating teamwork skills requires a consciousness on the part of the instructor and the teaching assistants. Pedagogies such as cooperative learning have been recognized as effective in helping students develop teamwork skills. We introduced a joint reflection on action approach to developing teamwork skills among novice students as part of a sophomore-level systems analysis and design course. In this evidence-based practice paper, we report on students’ reflections regarding their perceptions of teamwork. This study approaches the following research questions: What are students' reflections about the role of communication while working in teams in a cooperative project-based learning environment? The guiding pedagogical framework for this course is cooperative learning. The course requires the students to work in teams in a semester-long software development project. To elicit reflection on action about their teamwork experience. Specifically, we exposed students to concrete experiences as part of their teamwork interactions, which became the basis for observations and reflections. For this, the semester-long project was complemented with one reflection-on-action activity. In the activity, students were asked to watch a video of secrets of successful teamwork and were asked to reflect on their perceptions about the role of communication within teams. The students’ reflections on the activity were analyzed using qualitative inductive thematic analysis to understand the students’ perceptions regarding teamwork and communication within teams. 

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