How can instructors leverage assessment instruments in design, build, and test courses to simultaneously improve student outcomes and assess student learning well enough to improve courses for future students?
A learning statement is a structured [Experience|Learning|Value] text-based construct for students in AME4163 Principles of Engineering Design to record what they learned by reflecting on authentic immersive experiences throughout the semester. The immersive experiences include lectures, assignments, reviews, building, testing and a post-analysis for design of an electro-mechanical system to address a given customer need. Over the past three years. in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, we have collected almost 30,000 learning statements from almost 400 students that we propose to use to improve our understanding of what students have learned by reflecting on doing and thence how we might improve the delivery of the course.
In this paper, we briefly introduce the framework of a computer program used to process a large number of learning statements by way of providing context. We focus on comparing what students learned with what instructors expected the students to learn thus providing evidence-based guidance to instructors on how to improve the delivery of AME4163 thus providing an initial answer to the question posed above.
Shan Peng is a pursuing a MS in Data Science and Analytics at the University of Oklahoma. Shan is working with Professors Janet K. Allen and Farrokh Mistree in the Systems Realization Laboratory at OU. Her MS thesis is about design and development of a text mining program to facilitate instructors gain insight about students’ learning by analyzing their learning statements in engineering design, build and test courses. Shan is a winner of the “2019 NSF/ASME Student Design Essay Award”.
Zhenjun Ming is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering of University of Oklahoma. He is working with Professor Farrokh Mistree and Professor Janet K. Allen at the Systems Realization Laboratory @ OU. His research interest is to create knowledge-based decision support methods and tools to facilitate designers in the design of engineered systems. Zhenjun has published more than ten peer-reviewed research papers and will publish a Springer Monograph in 2021. His education focus is to create an environment for students to learn by reflecting on doing.
Zahed Siddique is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering of University of Oklahoma. His research interest include product family design, advanced material and engineering education. He is interested in motivation of engineering students, peer-to-peer learning, flat learning environments, technology assisted engineering education and experiential learning. He is the coordinator of the industry sponsored capstone from at his school and is the advisor of OU's FSAE team.
Janet Allen came to the University of Oklahoma in August 2009 where she and Professor Farrokh Mistree are establishing the Systems Realization Laboratory at the University of Oklahoma with a focus on engineering design. She holds the John and Mary Moore chair of Engineering and is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Before coming to OU, she retired from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where she is Professor Emerita. The focus of Dr. Allen’s research is engineering design and especially the management of uncertainty when making design decisions. Her group was among the first to suggest the use of modeling uncertainty in design, particularly in the early stages of design and to recognize the importance of statistical simulation and computer-based experimentation in design and was also among the first to demonstrate the importance of using the design of experiments in exploring regions of design space in order to create surrogate models. This is a necessary step in moving away from the costly and time-consuming method of testing designs by building prototypes and replacing physical prototypes with computer-based experiments. Using surrogate models lead to the investigation of various aspects of robust design of many different systems, especially multilevel and multiscale systems. A special focus has been on supporting collaborative decision making and design – several hierarchical procedures and game theory have been used to model collaborative design. Dr. Allen and her students study/have studied energy systems, mechanical systems, materials, and design methods and have published over 200 papers in journals, conference proceedings and edited books. She is a Fellow of ASME, a Senior Member of AIAA and an Honorary Member of the Mechanical Engineering Honor Society Pi Tau Sigma.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6835-0902
University of Oklahoma
[biography]
Farrokh’s passion is to have fun in providing an opportunity for highly motivated and talented people to learn how to define and achieve their dreams.
Farrokh Mistree holds the L. A. Comp Chair in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. Farrokh is a Fellow of ASME, an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a Life Member of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. He was named the ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Engineering Design Educator in 2011. In September 2012 he was recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. In December 2012, he received the Life Time Achievement Award from the International Society for Agile Manufacturing, Lafayette, Louisiana.
Farrokh co-directs the Systems Realization Laboratory @ OU with his wife Professor Janet K. Allen in Industrial and Systems Engineering. The Allen-Mistree research focus is on collaboratively defining the emerging frontier for the “intelligent” decision-based realization of complex (cyber-physical-social) systems when the computational models are incomplete and inaccurate. Their quest for answers to the key challenges are anchored in five research thrusts, namely,
Contextual Assessment of Student Learning through Reflection on Doing
Exploiting the Food-Energy-Water Nexus for Rural Development
Integrated Realization of Engineered Materials, Products, and Associated Manufacturing Processes
Knowledge-Based Dynamic Management of Multi-stage Complex Processes
Knowledge-Based Management of Computational Complexity and Risk
Knowledge-Based Platform for Decision Support in the Design of Engineered Systems
His current education focus is on creating and implementing, in partnership with industry, a curriculum for educating strategic engineers—those who have developed the competencies to create value through the realization of complex engineered systems.
Email farrokh.mistree@ou.edu
URL http://www.ou.edu/content/coe/ame/people/amefaculty/mistree.html
LinkedIN http://www.linkedin.com/pub/farrokh-mistree/9/838/8ba
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2020, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 26, 2021
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.