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When schools and universities across the world transitioned online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed+gineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that partners engineering and education undergraduates to design and deliver engineering lessons to elementary students, also had to shift its hands-on lessons to a virtual format. Through the lens of social cognitive theory (SCT), this study investigates engineering and education students’ experiences during the shift to online instruction to understand how they perceived its influence on their learning. As a result of modifying their lessons for online delivery, students reported learning professional skills, including skills for teaching online and educational technology skills, as well as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content. Some also lamented missed learning opportunities, like practice presenting face-to-face. Students’ affective responses were often associated with preparing and delivering their lessons. SCT sheds light on how the mid-semester change in their environment, caused by the shift in designing and teaching from face-to-face to online, affected the undergraduate engineering and education students’ personal experiences and affect. Overall, the transition to fully online was effective for students’ perceived learning and teaching of engineering. Though students experienced many challenges developing multimedia content for delivering hands-on lessons online, they reported learning new skills and knowledge and expressed positive affective responses. From the gains reported by undergraduates, we believe that this cross-disciplinary virtual team assignment was a successful strategy for helping undergraduates build competencies in virtual skills. We posit that similar assignment structures and opportunities post-pandemic will also continue to prepare future students for the post-pandemic workplace.
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This content will become publicly available on June 22, 2026
BOARD # 291: Progress in Evaluating Hands-on Learning Module Implementation and Considerations of Social Cognitive Theory
Over the past seven years, our team has disseminated low-cost hands-on learning hardware and associated worksheets in fluid mechanics and heat transfer to provide engineering students with an interactive learning experience. Previous studies have shown (1-5) the efficacy of teaching students with an active learning approach versus a more traditional lecture setup, with a number of approaches already available, such as simple active discussion, think-pair-share, flipped classrooms, etc. Our approach is differentiated by the inclusion of hardware to add both a visual aid and an opportunity for hands-on experimentation while keep the costs low enough for a classroom setting. Learning with a hands-on, interactive approach is supported by social cognitive theory (SCT) (6-7) and information processing theory (8). Unlike earlier views of learning theory, which simply posit that the key to learning is repetition, social cognitive theory considers the agency of the student and the social aspects of learning. The primary assumption of SCT is that students are active participants in the learning process, acquiring and displaying knowledge, skills, and behaviors that align with their goals through a process called triadic reciprocal causation, illustrated in figure 1.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821578
- PAR ID:
- 10639001
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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