Aligning Educational Experiences with Ways of Knowing Engineering: Improving Learning from Middle School through Professional Practice

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

The focus of this engineering education design project is two-fold: 1) to assess the epistemic frame of practicing engineers to identify the skills, knowledge, values, and ways of thinking that engineers in industry need; and 2) to assess the knowledge and skills that instructors, curricula, and guidance counselors communicate to students as prerequisites for pursuing engineering studies and for becoming successful engineers. The PIs will collect and analysis data from practicing engineers from two groups: the 1994 cohort of undergraduates who completed the first design course as freshmen at UW-Madison and participants in professional development courses sponsored by the Department of Engineering Professional Development (EPD). The proposed data collection methodologies for the practicing engineers provides a systematic approach, a large interdisciplinary sample, a specific longitudinal cohort from undergraduate to practicing engineer, and a thorough analysis and meta-analysis that lacking in the current literature. Second, having first-year engineering students conduct, reflect on, and analyze the interviews is a novel approach with potential benefits to student researchers that can easily be scaled up nationally. At the conclusion of the data collection with practicing professionals the PIs expect to have a robust profile of practicing professionals including the knowledge, skills, values, identity, and ways of knowing that make them engineers. They will evaluate the utility of having undergraduate engineers\ interview practicing professionals and analyze the resulting data as a means to develop the engineering epistemic frame of undergraduate engineers. They will produce a manuscript documenting those findings, as well as curricula and professional development materials to disseminate the technique. Regarding the second thrust of the project the PIs plan to study high school instructors' beliefs and curricula and use classroom observations to identify how engineering-related subject matter is presented to pre-engineering high school students and document how the science and mathematics education of high school students relates to engineering principles and practices. In addition, they will compare and contrast practices at the high school level to those in the first year of an engineering curriculum. The results of these studies will contribute to basic theory about the nature of pre-engineering education, the curriculum structure for pre-engineering, and the beliefs that high school teachers, guidance counselors, and first-year college instructors have about the developmental trajectories of potential engineers. They will design and facilitate a professional development workshop to help instructors integrate positive experiences into STEM curricula and develop a learning module to help career development facilitators understand engineering and promote it as a career based on accurate understandings about what an engineer does.