Research Initiation: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer within Engineering Curricula

Stevens Institute Of Technology, Hoboken NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Engineering students often have difficulty applying ideas from one course to another and using their learning in new ways. The students do not see the same links between their classes that their teachers see. This difficulty becomes a problem when these students go into the workplace and need to use their knowledge and learning in new ways for their career. We need to better understand why students face these problems and to find ways to help students transfer their learning to new settings. In this research, we will first seek to understand why students have problems applying their knowledge. We will then develop new ways to teach students that help them better transfer their learning. These new ways of teaching will be tested in order to show their effectiveness before being used to help teach future students. This work will increase our understanding of how to better prepare engineering students to apply their knowledge in their career. Although it is well-established that students have difficulty transferring theory and skills between courses in their undergraduate curriculum, many college-level courses only concern material relating to the course itself and do not cover how this material might be used elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that students struggle to transfer and integrate knowledge from multiple areas into new problems as part of capstone design courses, for example, or in their careers. The proposed investigation builds on work in the field of knowledge transfer which has noted the problems students often face in applying their understanding in new and unfamiliar situations. Various authors in both cognitive and disciplinary sciences have discussed these difficulties and noted the need to develop tools and techniques for promoting knowledge transfer, as well as to help students develop cross-course connections. This work will address the barriers to knowledge transfer, and crucially develop the needed activities and practices for promoting transfer by answering the following research questions: (1) What are the primary challenges experienced by students when tasked with transferring theory and skills from prior courses, specifically mathematics and physics? (2) What methods of prior knowledge activation are most effective in enabling students to apply this prior knowledge in new areas of study? In this investigation, the prior knowledge and motivation of students will be assessed using concept maps, concept inventories, and motivational surveys. Various in-class activities developed to support and enable knowledge transfer will then be piloted and assessed. The effectiveness of these activities will be assessed by examining student ability to transfer the knowledge required to solve these specially designed problems and by using surveys. Overall, this study will help to improve our understanding of the barriers to knowledge transfer, as well as developing promising practices that promote transfer. The activities, teaching practices, and techniques developed in this study will address the need for these tools identified in the literature. These promising practices can then be used to better inform teaching methods that aid the formation of engineers who are better equipped to transfer their knowledge across a broad range of applications. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.