Research in Engineering Student Learning

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Knowledge Integration of Learners

Description of project strand. In our research we seek to characterize how engineering students integrate knowledge gained through classes and other learning experiences, to characterize the relationship of this knowledge integration with the development of a professional engineering identity, to understand the effectiveness of current approaches to promoting knowledge integration, and to ultimately develop and evaluate instruction to enhance knowledge integration.

Relevance of project strand. To become effective practitioners, engineering students need to acquire an extensive amount of knowledge and to integrate that knowledge in expert-like ways. The engineering education community needs insight into how engineering students integrate knowledge (or fail to) in order to guide the design of curricular materials. Both students and the engineering education community can benefit from interventions that promote knowledge integration.

As illustrated in the figure, current educational practice involves breaking the knowledge of the discipline into discrete units that are taught in the courses of a curriculum. The idea is that students will integrate the ideas from the individual courses back into a coherent whole (see figure, bottom right). However, a danger is that students fail to see the connections among the ideas resulting in students with disconnected and possibly inert knowledge (see figure, bottom left).

Significant findings. Characterizing integration of professional knowledge: Visions in civil & industrial engineering. Our earliest work in this area consisted of a collection of small studies in which we sought to understand aspects of professional knowledge. For example, in one study, we asked civil engineering students to list the ideas that come to mind when prompted with the term "civil and environmental engineering". In the analysis, we assigned the terms of the list to the different EC2000 learning outcomes in order to explore the breadth of student's understanding of their engineering discipline (Turns et al. 2000). We discovered that some students have a broad conception of the discipline, as evidenced by word associated lists that address most or all of the 13 ABET learning outcomes, while other students have a more limited understanding of the profession, as evidence by word association links covering approximately half of the 13 ABET learning outcomes and including primarily technical knowledge topics.

In another exercise, we asked civil engineering students to identify issues that would be associated with a local bridge building project and also to identify the team that would be needed (Turns et al., 2001). The preliminary results suggest that students can think broadly about the problem when identifying issues. However, the teams that students suggested included mostly engineers and did not seem to reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the issues they identified.

We have also asked students to construct concept maps (node-arc diagrams depicting the relationships among concepts) in order to explore the extent to which students' knowledge is integrated (Atman, 2001). We have found evidence of students with tightly structured professional knowledge (i.e., concept maps with strong and meaningful interconnections among concepts) as well as students with disconnected or fragmented professional knowledge (i.e., concept maps in which some terms are not integrated at all and other terms are more loosely connected).

• Rhone, E., Adams, R.S., Turns, J., and Atman, C.J. (2003). Assessing IE Students' Preparedness for Practice: Do They Think Broadly?, Proceedings for the Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Portland, OR, May 2003.
• Turns, J., Atman, C.J., and Bennett, J. (2001). Assessing Student Preparedness for Professional Engineering Practice: A Professional Advice Task, Proceedings of the 2001 Frontiers in Education Conference, Reno, NV.
• Atman, C.J. (2001). Keynote Presentation, Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Canterbury England. "What Do Engineering Students Know?"
• Turns, J., Temple, J., and Atman, C. (2000). "Understanding Engineering Student Disciplinary Knowledge Ð A Free Recall Study", Proceedings of the 2000 American Society for Engineering Education Conference, St. Louis, MO.

Designing and evaluating complementary capstone experiences. We have experimented with the design of senior-level courses that focus specifically on professional knowledge as a whole and knowledge integration as a theme. One course was organized around a collaborative concept mapping activity where teams iterated weekly on concept maps of civil engineering (Turns et al. 2000, Atman and Turns, 1999). A second course was organized around the thirteen ABET learning outcomes and involved an individual "explain IE to another audience" project (Turns et al. 2001). Collectively, the results of these experimental course offerings have highlighted the differences between what students believe prepares them for professional practice and what faculty and industry practitioners believe prepares them, and also the individual differences among students about what they believe prepares them for professional practice. These mismatches manifested themselves in students' reactions to guest lecturers (Turns et al, 2000), students' reactions to specific activities (Turns et al., 2000; Turns and Atman, 2001), and students' mixed reactions to the courses overall (Turns et al., 2000; Turns and Atman, 2001).

• Turns, J. and Atman, C.J. (2001). Preparing for Professional Practice in Industrial Engineering: A Complementary Capstone Experience Influenced by the EC2000 Outcomes, Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Conference, Albuquerque, NM.
• Turns, J., Atman, C. J., and Mannering, F. (2000). "Preparing for Professional Practice: Empirical Course Evaluation and Implications", Proceedings of the 2000 Frontiers in Education Conference, Kansas City, MO.
• Atman, C.J. and Turns, J. (1999). "Integrating Knowledge across the Engineering Curriculum", Proceedings of the 1999 Frontiers in Education Conference, Charlotte, NC.

Exploring engineering students' conceptions of their profession. With a goal of gaining deeper insight into the issue of how engineering students understand their profession, we have collected and analyzed concept maps of industrial engineering generated by sophomore, junior, and senior students in industrial engineering. While we have failed to find statistical differences across student level in the number of concepts included in the maps, we have found statistical differences across student level in the number of concepts from an original word association that students ultimately incorporated into the map (Turns et al., in progress; Turns, 2003; Adams et al., 2001). This result suggests that sophomores are learning concepts faster than they are building their conceptual structure. As part of this work, we have worked to educate others about the value of concept maps (Turns et al., 2000a; Turns et al, 2000b).

• Turns, J., Adams, R.S., and Valeriano, M. (in progress). Exploring Students' Conceptions of their Engineering Discipline: Concept Mapping in Industrial Engineering, to be submitted to the Journal of Engineering Education.
• Turns, J. (2003). Linking Research in Learning Sciences and Engineering Education: A Sample of Empirical Studies, Presentation given to the Nordic Chapter of the IEEE Education Society, Uppsala, Sweden, May 2003.
• Adams, R., Valeriano, M., Turns, J., and Atman, C. (2001). Industrial Engineering Pitt Concept Mapping Project: Findings from Phase I, CELT Technical Report CELT-01-09, Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
• Turns, J., Atman, C.J., and Adams, R. (2000a). "Concept Maps for Assessment in Engineering Education", Workshop given at the Rose Hulman - Best Assessment Processes III conference, Terre Haute, IN.
• Turns, J., Atman, C. and Adams, R. (2000b). "Concept Maps for Engineering Education: A Cognitively Motivated Tool Supporting Varied Assessment Functions", IEEE Transactions on Education, 32(2), pp. 164-173.

Using portfolios to promote knowledge integration. This project began recently. As a result, we do not yet have findings to report. We plan to report findings on a) the extent to which portfolio construction promotes knowledge integration in engineering students and b) the character of students' conceptual structures in engineering, as revealed through the professional portfolios they develop and the commentary they provide on these portfolios.

• Turns, J. and Ramey, J. (2003). Using Portfolios to Help Students Navigate Across Borders. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference for the Council of Programs in Scientific and Technical Communication, Postdam, NY, October 2003.

Current status.
Unlike our design research strand (which is over 10 years young), we are only four years into developing this strand of research. The work to date has been supported by a Post-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, and Action Agenda grant from the national science foundation, and internal grants through the University of Washington. The work is currently supported by an NSF Career award, "Using portfolios to promote knowledge integration in engineering education." This award began in July of 2003 and will run through June of 2007.