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2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board # 4 : Methods and Preliminary Findings for Developing and Assessing Engineering Students’ Cognitive Flexibility in the Domain of Sustainable Design

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Many engineering problems can be viewed as “sustainability problems”, and thus problem-solving requires knowledge from multiple domains (technical, environmental, economic, and social). Engineering students should be educated about sustainability and be trained to apply sustainability concepts in design in order to produce better products, processes, infrastructure, etc. Students gain knowledge in relevant domains from a variety of undergraduate classes (both engineering and non-engineering), yet they have difficulty connecting knowledge from across classes or domains to fully analyze problems and evaluate sustainability trade-offs. Operating under this premise, the first goal of our research is to help students apply (or supplement) their knowledge relating to sustainable design dimensions (i.e., technical, environmental, economic, social) to complex, engineering problems, such as the ones they encounter during capstone design and will encounter in the real-world. The second goal is to improve assessment of students’ abilities to apply sustainable engineering design concepts across different problems or design challenges. We hypothesize that with guided practice and feedback, engineering undergraduate students will become better at drawing on diverse knowledge domains and integrating it when they are faced with new, complex problems.

Cognitive flexibility theory (CFT) and adaptive expertise provide constructs for assessing students’ knowledge transfer and connection building that is needed to adequately address sustainability problems. The primary objective of this work is to use CFT and adaptive expertise criteria to guide both learning and assessment of sustainable design. Our paper will present progress and preliminary findings in two areas: (1) Identifying appropriate measures of knowledge transfer/cognitive flexibility/adaptive expertise that apply to engineering design tasks and (2) Developing and adapting instructional materials and assessments to measure and help students improve ability to transfer knowledge to/across sustainable design problems. Specifically, we will describe our efforts to refine measures of cognitive flexibility and adaptive expertise by measuring improved cognitive functions (e.g., study of flexibility/performance using an electroencephalogram or EEG), an approach which is underdeveloped in engineering education research, particularly for complex problem-solving like sustainable design. We will also present progress on new or adapted assessment tools that focus on direct measures of student domain knowledge in different contexts (e.g., automated scoring of concept maps) and correct application of knowledge (e.g., cross-disciplinary sustainable design rubrics). We are focusing on practical assessment tools that are transferable to other institutions and across engineering departments, and also grounded in evidence (e.g., characterizing brain waves measured with an EEG to triangulate with measurements from learning assessments).

Authors
  1. Dr. Elise Barrella P.E. Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0020-2035 James Madison University [biography]

    Dr. Elise Barrella is the founder and CEO of DfX Consulting LLC which offers engineering education and design research, planning and consulting services. She is a registered Professional Engineer and was a Founding Faculty member of the Department of Engineering at Wake Forest University. She is passionate about curriculum development, scholarship and student mentoring on transportation systems, sustainability, and engineering design. Dr. Barrella completed her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Georgia Tech where she conducted research in transportation and sustainability as part of the Infrastructure Research Group (IRG). In addition to the Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, Dr. Barrella holds a Master of City and Regional Planning (Transportation) from Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Bucknell University. Dr. Barrella has investigated best practices in engineering education since 2003 (at Bucknell University) and began collaborating on sustainable engineering design research while at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining the WFU faculty, she led the junior capstone design sequence at James Madison University, was the inaugural director of the NAE Grand Challenges Program at JMU, and developed first-year coursework and interdisciplinary electives.

  2. Dr. Mary Katherine Watson Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1718-5825 The Citadel [biography]

    Mary Katherine Watson is currently an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel. She holds BS and MS degrees in Biosystems Engineering from Clemson University and a PhD in Environmental Engineering from The Georgia Institute of Technology. She enjoys, and has invested significantly, in the development of her undergraduate students, serving as past faculty advisor for numerous student groups. Dr. Watson is passionate about improving access to engineering education and serves as the faculty director for a scholarship program to recruit and support high-performing, low-income civil engineering students. Dr. Watson is also interested in understanding and assessing students’ cognitive processes, especially development of cognitive flexibility and interactions with cognitive load. Dr. Watson is the proud recipient of seven teaching awards and six best paper awards. She was previously named the Young Civil Engineer of the Year by the South Carolina Section of ASCE and currently serves as a Senior Associate Editor for the Journal of Civil Engineering Education.

  3. Dr. Olga Pierrakos James Madison University [biography]

    Olga Pierrakos is a Founding Faculty and Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University. She is currently a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Undergraduate Education. Her expertise and interests focus on diversity and inclusion, engineer identity, PBL, innovative learning-centered pedagogies, assessment of student learning, engineering design, capstone design, etc. She also conducts research in cardiovascular fluid mechanics and sustainable energy technologies. She holds a BS and MS in Engineering Mechanics and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Tech.

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