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Authentic Discourse for the 2020 Engineer March 10, 2008

Posted by Arun in Future Engineer, Teaching Practice.
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This is my second post on the 2020 Engineer theme and certainly won’t be the last one, I don’t think!  2020…that’s about 12 years from now!   Isn’t 12 years a pretty long planning horizon to plan for? I wonder why the National Academy of Engineering report that I blogged about in a previous post picked 2020 to plan for. 20 years into the 21st century!

Well, in any case, I mentioned in my previous post about the 2020 engineer that I was part of a NSF CCLI Phase 2 project on cultivating authentic discourse for the 2020 engineer. I thought I would write a little about this project.

My co-author of this blog, Louis Everett, had a National Science Foundation CCLI Phase 1 project on using multiple intelligences to teach dynamics. Based on results from that first grant, we got together with colleagues Violet Jones, Kerrie Kephart and Elsa Villa from the College of Education here at UTEP and wrote a Phase 2 proposal to NSF. And NSF gave us half a million dollars (although I’ve never seen anything larger than a 20 dollar bill in my life so far) to research how we can cultivate authentic engineering discourse for the 2020 engineer.

We use counterintuitive problems to systematically try and uncover student misconceptions in engineering concepts. Designing these counterintuitive activities are not trivial – it is difficult even for faculty (who have PhDs). Our colleagues from College of Education observe what we do and what happens in the classroom to see if learning occurs. Faculty think about their thinking (like what I am doing in this blog), so faculty learn too. We have several faculty from UTEP, and faculty from NMSU, Baylor, UT Panam, and Prairie View A & M already trying these methods in their classes.

If you are a faculty and would like to be part of our project or try some of our methods, send me an email at apennathur@utep.edu. You can also read about our project at http://2020engineer.iss.utep.edu/world.

We lecture and discuss – a lot! March 9, 2008

Posted by Arun in Teaching Practice.
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I was reading the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and found that a large percentage (83%) of instructional faculty use lectures and discussion as the primary instructional method in undergraduate classes. Here are some other interesting tidbits about higher education faculty from the report:

  • More than half of natural sciences and engineering faculty require their undergraduate students to participate in group projects (compared with 48% of social and behavioral sciences faculty), and more than 60% require lab assignments (compared with 24% of social and behavioral sciences faculty).
  • The use of term papers increased in all disciplines between 1992 and 2003. Social and behavioral sciences faculty are more likely than faculty in other S&E fields to require written work of their students: 85% of social and behavioral sciences faculty require term papers of their undergraduate students compared with 76% of agricultural/biological/health sciences faculty and 57% of physical/mathematics/computer sciences/engineering faculty.

You can read the full report at: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/toc.htm.

I lecture, discuss (a lot thanks to an NSF CCLI Phase 2 grant I am part of on metacognition and discourse in engineering), and use projects.  I don’t think I have my undergraduate students write enough, though.