“An ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions” is a fundamental outcome of all engineering programs. Students conduct laboratory experiments in all areas of engineering and report on their findings. New faculty, however, have little experience or training in how to develop effective lab report assignments and instruct students on how to write laboratory reports. In an effort to improve both the teaching and learning of laboratory report writing, engineering educators from three distinct universities (one large public research university, one small public polytechnic university, and one private undergraduate university) developed a series of online laboratory report writing instructional modules. These modules were presented to laboratory instructors, half with less than four years of teaching experience—at a Community of Practice (CoP) retreat in the spring of 2022. Focus groups were conducted with the instructors to determine the potential benefits and shortcomings of the modules, after which the modules underwent significant revisions. Near the conclusion of the CoP retreat, participants reported feeling motivated to implement the newly revised modules to improve their laboratory report writing instruction. Follow-up focus groups were conducted in the following winter to determine if this motivation remained high throughout the summer and resulted in the development of new and improved laboratory assignments in the new academic year. The paper will briefly introduce the modules and present the results of these focus group meetings.
more »
« less
Using Wikipedia Assignments to Teach Critical Thinking and Scientific Writing in STEM Courses
While many instructors have reservations against Wikipedia use in academic settings, editing Wikipedia teaches students valuable writing, editing, and critical thinking skills. Wikipedia assignments align with the community of inquiry framework, which focuses on the elements needed for a successful online learning experience. We report on a faculty mentoring network, created by WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography, which helped 14 instructors with little to no prior experience implement a Wikipedia assignment in their classes. We found that Wikipedia assignments increase students’ motivation to produce high quality work and enhance their awareness of reliable scientific sources. Wikipedia assignments can be comparable to other writing assignments in length and complexity, but have a far wider audience than a traditional research paper. Participants in our mentoring network reported challenges with implementing this new type of assignment, and here, we share resources and solutions to those reported barriers.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10378034
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Education
- Volume:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2504-284X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Many universities are offering data science (DS) courses to fulfill the growing demands for skilled DS practitioners. Assignments and projects are essential parts of the DS curriculum as they enable students to gain hands-on experience in real-world DS tasks. However, most current assignments and projects are lacking in at least one of two ways: 1) they do not comprehensively teach all the steps involved in the complete workflow of DS projects; 2) students work on separate problems individually or in small teams, limiting the scale and impact of their solutions. To overcome these limitations, we envision novel synergistic modular assignments where a large number of students work collectively on all the tasks required to develop a large-scale DS product. The resulting product can be continuously improved with students' contributions every semester. We report our experience with developing and deploying such an assignment in an Information Retrieval course. Through the assignment, students collectively developed a search engine for finding expert faculty specializing in a given field. This shows the utility of such assignments both for teaching useful DS skills and driving innovation and research. We share useful lessons for other instructors to adopt similar assignments for their DS courses.more » « less
-
When instructors want to design programming assignments to motivate their students, a common design choice is to have those students write code to make an artifact (e.g. apps, games, music, or images). The goal of this study is to understand the impacts of including artifact creation in a programming assignment on students’ motivation, time on task, and cognitive load. To do so, we conducted a controlled lab study with seventy-three students from an introductory engineering course. The experimental group created a simulation they could interact with – thus having the full experience of artifact creation – while the control group wrote the exact same code, but evaluated it only with test cases. We hypothesized that students who could interact with the simulation they were programming would be more motivated to complete the assignment and report higher intrinsic motivation. However, we found no significant difference in motivation or cognitive load between the groups. Additionally, the experimental group spent more time completing the assignment than the control group. Our results suggest that artifact creation may not be necessary for motivating students in all contexts, and that artifact creation may have other effects such as increased time on task. Additionally, instructors and researchers should consider when, and in what contexts, artifact creation is beneficial and when it may not bemore » « less
-
To enhance conceptual understanding of mathematical models for inventory management, we developed poetry-writing assignments for a required, upper-level undergraduate course in an industrial and systems engineering program. Specifically, two poetry-writing assignments were incorporated into an inventory and supply chain system design and control course. The first assignment, due one week before the first term exam, asked students to write a poem about a concept, model or topic related to deterministic inventory modeling. The second and assignment, due one week before the second term exam, asked the students to write a poem about a concept, model or topic related to stochastic inventory modeling. The students were also asked to respond to several open-ended questions on their approach to writing the poems and their assessment of the impact of these poetry writing on improving their conceptual understanding of the underlying mathematical models. Data was collected in Spring 2022 semester. The student written-poetry will be analyzed for correctness and to identify misunderstandings or gaps in understanding. In this paper, we will present our findings from the content analysis of student-written poetry and our preliminary findings on the effectiveness of poetry-writing assignments to enhance conceptual understanding of mathematical models for inventory management.more » « less
-
Most engineering students are rarely assigned creative tasks to think abstractly around mathematical models, other than being asked to apply theory to real-world scenarios. Challenging the traditional pedagogy, students enrolled in inventory and supply chain system design and control, an upper-level industrial and systems engineering course, were asked to complete two poems throughout the semester-long course. The students were asked to construct poems around a concept, model, or topic covered in the course: the first poem was focused on deterministic inventory modeling and the second poem was focused on stochastic inventory modeling. At the end of the semester, students completed a lookback survey asking several open-ended questions detailing their experience and attitude towards these creative writing assignments. Data was collected during the semesters Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 and of the 84 total students over the two semesters, 64 consented to participate in the study. The student responses to reflection prompts and student-written poems were analyzed to understand how engineering students approached this creative writing assignment, what type of creative processes they utilized to complete these assignments, and how these assignments contributed to their learning. To this end, the student responses to reflection prompts were analyzed to identify the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as to elicit the steps of their processes toward completing these assignments. A sample of of student-written poems were examined in detail to assess their technical accuracy as well. In this paper, we will present our findings on why students pick specific topics for their poems and how their reasons for choosing topics influence their effort in their writing as well as the technical accuracy of their poems.more » « less