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Virginia Tech Engineering Communication Center (VTECC)

CAREER: An Exploration of Faculty Expertise and Student Learning in Capstone Experiences

PI: Marie C. Paretti

Capstone design experiences represent a critical transition between the academic classroom and the contemporary workplace, and as such have become both important sites for industry partnerships and essential components of programmatic assessment and accreditation. Capstone projects require students to move beyond rote knowledge and apply life-long learning, engineering judgment, analytical decision-making, and critical thinking to address complex problems in light of a broad spectrum of social, environmental, economic, and global constraints. Even when design experiences recur throughout a curriculum, capstone courses form an important bridge between school and work as students bring their classroom learning to bear on the process of conducting and managing a complex extended project. In this context, instructors often function as coaches or mentors, while maintaining responsibility for designing assignments and evaluating student performance. To enhance teaching and learning in this vital area, this project will examine expert teaching in the capstone environment through four key research questions:

• RQ 1. What teaching practices do capstone design instructors across the nation currently employ?
• RQ 2. To what degree do those practices reflect known behaviors associated with expert teaching?
• RQ 3. What knowledge and behaviors do expert capstone instructors exhibit that advances our understanding of teaching expertise in this context?
• RQ 4. How do students perceive the knowledge, behavior, and influence of capstone instructors?

These questions will be answered in a four-phase mixed methods study consisting of 1) a national survey of capstone instructors, 2) interviews with selected instructors identified through the national survey, paired with student surveys; 3) case studies of expert instructors identified through the interviews and student surveys; 4) development, implementation, and assessment of innovative programs for graduate students and faculty to enhance capstone instructor preparation.

Building Connections within the Engineering Education Research Community 2009-2010

PI: Lisa D. McNair

Collaborators: Marie C. Paretti, Hayden Griffin, Aditya Johri, Jenny Lo, Chris Williams

This conference is design to foster the dissemination of cutting-edge research in engineering education by bringing together NSF PIs in the areas of Engineering Education Research, Programs (REU, RET, NUE, CAREER, EEP), and Research Centers. The conference will incorporate strong graduate student involvement to build the engineering education research base for the future. Specifically, this conference will benefit grantees by:

• Enhancing networks of researchers and practitioners in engineering education
• Enabling educators to share ideas and best practices within Engineering Education-funded initiatives
• Delivering workshops to help PIs and coordinators publish in archived journals, assess educational projects, recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups, and report progress to NSF
• Answering program-specific questions for PIs and coordinators
• Stimulating new approaches and solutions to engineering education problems.

In addition, the meetings seek to target and support several other key constituents: 1) the new PhD graduates who join our institutions in the coming years and will continue to educate undergraduate and graduate engineers through the middle of this century; 2) undergraduate students engaged in research who will become the graduate students of the future; and 3) K-12 teachers and outreach coordinators who are critical in helping us attract a diverse, motivated group of students into our university programs. As a result, future meetings will also benefit students and K-12 educators by:

• Promoting the engagement of engineering graduate students in the enterprise of engineering education
• Providing a forum for undergraduate students to engage with peers and mentors from across the country
• Bringing K-12 teachers and outreach coordinators together to facilitate increased coordination and collaboration.

These meetings will promote horizontal networks of collaboration and dissemination among those who conduct engineering education research funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as vertical networks of engagement among those who are vital to the success of our mission.

Preparing Engineering Students for the Challenges of Interdisicplinary Design Teams

PI: Lisa D. McNair

Collaborators: Marie C. Paretti, Maura Borrego, Janis Terpenny, Richard Goff

The purpose of this mixed methods research is to identify factors that lead to successful interdisciplinary collaborations, and to determine how to bring those factors into undergraduate engineering curricula in ways that more effectively prepare students for interdisciplinary work. Using a Concurrent Triangulation Design, we will gather and synthesize data from three sources: industry professionals, university faculty, and engineering undergraduates. In doing so, we address three major areas identified by the NSF-funded Engineering Education Research Colloquies: 1) “Engineering Thinking, Knowledge, and Competencies,” 2) “Learning to Engineer,” and 3) “Engineering Assessment Methodologies.”

Our data will illuminate factors such as a) attitudes and meta-knowledge, b) strategies for soliciting and exchanging information, c) approaches to collective decision-making and problem-solving, and d) peripherals such as corporate cultures, physical space, and management styles.

We specifically focus on collaborations in which participants from multiple disciplines benefit not only from the products of teamwork, but also from the process. In such teams, team-members work together in a way that moves beyond simple division of labor, learn from working in other disciplines, and generate integrative ideas and solutions. We anticipate variability in the kinds of models based on different disciplinary configurations, and our goal is to find transferable concepts that contribute to a unified theoretical model of interdisciplinary collaboration that can later be applied to a wide range of educational settings.

Building Interdisciplinary Collaboration Skills Through A Green Engineering Capstone Design Experience

PI: Marie C. Paretti

Collaborators: Lisa D. McNair, Maura Borrego, Sean McGinnis, John J. Lesko, Stephen Kampe, Robert Grisso, David Dillard

This proposal seeks funds to create and test innovative new learning materials and teaching practices that effectively support interdisciplinary design experiences. Though many universities offer dynamic interdisciplinary design experiences, few provide undergraduates with the meta-knowledge needed to effectively engage in cross-disciplinary collaboration[1]. As a result, students learn to work with particular colleagues on given projects, but may not develop transferable skills that enable them to enter new interdisciplinary situations with strategies for negotiating conflicts, integrating knowledge, and achieving creative solutions to complex problems. To address this gap, this project will provide:

• Learning materials and teaching practices to help students and faculty 1) understand the challenges and benefits of working with colleagues from other fields, 2) effectively plan and organize interdisciplinary projects, 3) intentionally and productively address the challenges and opportunities unique to interdisciplinary collaboration, and 4) successfully integrate expertise from multiple disciplines in dynamic new ways.
• Rigorous assessment of the outcomes and effectiveness of the teaching material to determine 1) best practices that can be transferred to and tested in other settings, 2) questions for further research regarding teaching and learning in interdisciplinary design.

To test these materials and practices, we will use our university’s Green Engineering Program as the site of a new college-wide interdisciplinary capstone design course, within initial participants from Materials Science and Engineering, Engineering Science and Mechanics, and Biological Systems Engineering.