RESEARCH: THE FORMATION OF ENGINEERS IN THE RESEARCH LAB: A COGNITIVE ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY

University Of North Texas, Denton TX

Investigators

Abstract

For engineering and science students at all levels, experience working in an actual research laboratory is increasingly regarded as an essential part of their education. Authentic research experiences, as opposed to laboratory courses that simulate set experiments, are favored because they expose students to the real practices of science and engineering. This exposure reinforces the knowledge and understanding students gain in their formal coursework. However, this movement raises a number of critical questions. How much is known about whether, how, and why authentic research experiences contribute to the students? learning? What are the learning outcomes of authentic research experiences? How does learning and professionalization unfold in the lab? What are the problems or dysfunctions that can arise? How do research experiences increase educational opportunities or inequities? Previous studies have focused primarily on formal laboratory simulation courses. Few studies of actual research labs have focused on the details of the learning process. This study addresses a gap in the research on engineering education and professional formation by examining the processes of learning and professionalization as they play out in detail in a single engineering research lab. The researchers collect detailed, qualitative data on the inner workings of the laboratory, in order to understand the role of learning and professionalization in the laboratory culture. This research traces the fine details of the learning process in specific practices and moments of learning. The approach is a useful precursor to designing more valid quantitative investigations of student learning; it also plays an important role in identifying myths and misconceptions about the learning process that can impede engineering education efforts. This study will impact fields including cognitive science and science and technology studies by extending the methods and theories for studying learning and development in complex, social spaces in rich, qualitative, situated detail. This research will specifically include a focus on the relationship between authentic research experiences and educational equity, to trace ways in which such research experiences might combat or contribute to existing inequities. The methodological approach of our study is cognitive ethnography, based in the theoretical frameworks of situated learning and distributed cognition. Researchers will use general and cognitive ethnography to understand the culture of the laboratory, trace the processes by which students become enculturated into that laboratory, how they learn to participate in the cognitive activities of the lab, and how this impacts their professional formation. This study provides a crucial foundation for comparative and hypothesis-driven explorations of student learning in authentic research experiences. In particular, in-depth, situated, qualitative, process-focused research can guide hypothesis-driven or quantitative research to be more ecologically valid. This study will contribute to the field of engineering and science education, and learning sciences more generally, by addressing the gaps in those fields about the details of the learning process in authentic research experiences, as well as directly and indirectly informing science and education research and practices. As this project extends the range of work using methods of cognitive ethnography and the theories of situated learning and distributed cognition, this study will also provide advance knowledge and research methods in the fields of cognitive science and science and technology studies, where such approaches play an important role. This research will both directly guide improvements to local and global pedagogical practices, and indirectly improve it through providing a firmer foundation for future pedagogical research. 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.