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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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Work in Progress: Assessment of Reflective Thinking in Graduate Engineering Students: Human and Machine Methods
Engineering education is increasingly looking to the liberal arts to broaden and diversify preparation of students for professional careers. The present study involves an elective graduate environmental engineering course that incorporated the arts and humanities. The goal of the course was to develop engineers and technical professionals who would become both more appreciative of and better equipped to address technical, ethical, social, and cultural challenges in engineering through the development of critical and reflective thinking skills and reflective practice in their professional work. A reflective writing assignment was submitted by students following each of fourteen course topics in response to the following question: Reflect on how you might want to apply what you learned to your development as a professional and/or to your daily life. Student responses were classified by human coders using qualitative text analytic methods and their classifications were attempted to be learned by a simple machine classifier. The goal of this analysis was to identify and quantify students’ reflections on prospective behaviors that emerged through participation in the course. The analysis indicated that the primary focus of students’ responses was self-improvement, with additional themes involving reflection, teamwork, and improving the world. The results provide a glimpse into how broadening and diversifying the curriculum might shape students’ thinking in directions that are more considerate of their contributions to their profession and society. In the discussion, we consider the findings from the human and machine assessments and suggest how incorporating AI machine methods into engineering provides new possibilities for engineering pedagogy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1806889
- PAR ID:
- 10388520
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This work in progress paper assesses whether a first-year ePortfolio experience promotes better reflection in subsequent engineering courses. While reflection is vital to promote learning, historically, reflection receives less attention in engineering education when compared to other fields [1]. Yet, cultivating more reflective engineers yields several important benefits including building self-efficacy and empowering student agency. Through continued practice, engineering students can develop a habit of reflective thinking which increases students’ ability to transfer knowledge across contexts. The adoption of ePortfolios is becoming an increasingly popular strategy to improve student learning and establish a culture of reflection. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States is beginning to incorporate ePortfolios into courses. Professors of a first-year design course developed an ePortfolio assignment that gives students a space to reflect on their potential career paths and envision themselves as future engineers. We were curious about the impact this experience might have on students’ reflective thinking as they continue through the program. This work was guided by the research question: Do student ePortfolios in a first-year design course promote better reflection in subsequent technical courses? In this paper, we investigate this question by coding instances of reflection in student lab reports from a second-year design course. As a control group, lab reports from students the previous year who had not completed the ePortfolio activity were compared. We provide a quantitative summary of our analysis which concludes students that were provided with a reflective ePortfolio experience in their first-year are more reflective thinkers in their second-year.more » « less
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