Individualized, Scalable, and Interactive Assessment and Instruction for Engineering Education

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Domestic engineering graduates continue to decline in numbers just as the nation enters a period of increasing need for engineers to address new threats to national security and to continue the growth of our technology driven economy. An increasingly urgent concern is the low diversity in the engineering workforce. For example the evolution of demographics indicates that college-age individuals will increasingly comprise ethnic minorities. For example, these minority students represent over 80 percent of the K-12 Los Angeles Unified School District, but represent only 6 percent (for Latino students) and 3 percent (for African American students) in the UCLA freshman class. Thus, with inadequate ability to recruit and retain underrepresented students, overall engineering production will be reduced yet further. This urgent issue has lead to the recent development and successful use of Individualized, Interactive Instruction (3I) tools by collaboration between the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS), the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS), and the Center for Excellence in Engineering Diversity (CEED). This planning program focuses on the development of individualized instruction with interactive methods that link large student groups with instructors in the class room to provide real-time assessment to guide the instructional process. This planning program will focus on 1) Expansion of individualized real-time assessment methods (that are supportive of students and instructors) to all engineering and supporting disciplines with a task force of experts in education and engineering, 2) Scaling of individualized methods from its current application to about 20 students to classes of over 200 students. This will be accomplished by incorporation of network-based automated reasoning capability at the student client devices providing a summary of student progress to the instructor. 3) the development of a Community that shares 3I content, algorithms, planning, and assessment results. Broad societal impacts of these program goals are to increase the production of engineers through fundamental improvements in our ability to successfully instruct and support students. This program also inherently provides broad educational impact through creation of infrastructure supporting all students and in particular, underrepresented students. This program will also engage underrepresented students in the actual technology development and verification effort.