Tag Archives: education

Alternative definition of education

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I am taking a final week of vacation before the new academic year starts.  During the fortnight of vacation we took in July, I read a novel by Elizabeth Taylor called ‘A View of the Harbour‘.  One sentence in particular struck a chord with me: ‘education [meant] the insinuation into children’s heads as painlessly as possible of a substance which might later turn out to have money-making properties’.  It describes how I sometimes feel, in my more cynical moments, about teaching in a university today.

 

Motivated by fruitful applications

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In my series of posts on creating a learning environment [CALE #1 to #5, so far], I have mentioned Everyday Engineering Examples frequently, but what are they?  In the workshops on which the series is based, I define them as ‘familiar real-life objects or situations used to illustrate engineering principles’.  We have found in our research that the level of difficulty had no significant influence on the effectiveness of the examples in supporting student learning.  In the research, we combined them with 5E lesson plans and tested them alongside control classes [see Campbell et al., 2008].   So, it is not necessary to simplify the example to use as a part of lecture; instead the level of idealisation should be minimised to retain the relevance and context from the students’ perspective.

The choice of example is critical: there must be a transparent connection to the students’ experience and simultaneously the example must provide a straightforward implementation of the engineering principle being taught.  The subsequent exploration, explanation, elaboration and evaluation in the 5E lesson plan should pose questions with useful or interesting answers because the absence of a useful or interesting end-point creates a risk of presenting a tedious intellectual exercise.  And, perceived usefulness of learning influences students motivation [Wigfield & Eccles, 2000].

So what we are looking for are ‘fruitful applications’, in the words of Art Heinricher, Dean of Undergraduate Studies & Professor of Mathematical Sciences, WPI.  For lots of Everyday Engineering Examples, see https://realizeengineering.blog/everyday-engineering-examples/.

Reference:

Wigfield A, Eccles JS, Expectancy-value theory of motivation, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1): 68-81, 2000.

Campbell PB, Patterson EA, Busch Vishniac I, Kibler T, (2008).  Integrating Applications in the Teaching of Fundamental Concepts, Proc. 2008 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, (AC 2008-499).

 

CALE #6 [Creating A Learning Environment: a series of posts based on a workshop given periodically by Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson in the USA supported by NSF and the UK supported by HEA]

Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate

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This quintet of ‘E’ words form the core of the 5Es lesson plans.  They probably appeared first in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study of the 1980s based on work by Atkin and Karplus [1962].  They form a series of headings for constructing your lesson or lecture plan.  This framework has been used to construct all of the lesson plans posted on this blog [https://realizeengineering.blog/everyday-engineering-examples/].  Since the lesson plans are designed for introductory engineering courses, the Engage step always incorporates an Everyday Engineering Example.  I have amended the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the 5Es below to illustrate the content of each step.

  • Engage – to attract and hold fast [the students’ attention]
  • Explore – to look into closely, scrutinize, to pry into [the topic of the lesson]
  • Explain – to unfold, to make plain or intelligible [the principle underpinning the topic]
  • Elaborate – to work out in detail [an exemplar employing the principle]
  • Evaluate – to reckon up, ascertain the amount of [knowledge and understanding acquired by the students]

The combination of 5Es and E cubed [Everyday Engineering Example] works well.  We found that they increased student participation and understanding as well as attracting higher student ratings of lecturers and the course [Campbell et al. 2008].

References:

Atkin JM & Karplus R, Discovery or invention? Science Teacher 29(5): 45, 1962.

Little W, Fowler HW, Coulson J & Onions CT, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Guild Publishing, London, 1983.

Campbell PB, Patterson EA, Busch Vishniac I & Kibler T, Integrating Applications in the Teaching of Fundamental Concepts, Proc. 2008 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, (AC 2008-499), 2008.

 

CALE #5 [Creating A Learning Environment: a series of posts based on a workshop given periodically by Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson in the USA supported by NSF and the UK supported by HEA]

Experiences in the lecture theatre

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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about cycling students around Honey and Mumford’s learning modes [See ‘So how do people learn?‘ on June 20th 2018] without explaining how this might be achieved in a lecture course.  The first step in the cycle is having an experience, which is difficult for a student in a lecture theatre with dozens of other people.  A demonstration by the lecturer does not achieve it because the student is not doing and feeling.

So, how can the first step be achieved in a traditional engineering lecture course?  Well one answer, for introductory courses, is to exploit the everyday experiences of the students by choosing something that they will have done for themselves, preferably more than once.  It can be useful to perform a demonstration at the start of the lecture to engage the students and remind them about their own experience.  All of the lesson plans provided on this blog start with this kind of activity [https://realizeengineering.blog/everyday-engineering-examples/].

The lecture can proceed to reviewing the experience and building a new context around it, i.e. the engineering principles that are being taught.  It might necessary to review the experience in several different ways and make a series of connections to it.  I recommend that the third step: concluding from the experience, should be a student activity guided by the instructor – perhaps a piece of homework that leads the student to take the fourth step on their own, becoming a Pragmatist by planning their next steps.

Doris Lessing, Nobel Laureate for Literature, in ‘The Four-gated City‘ wrote ‘That is what learning is.  You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.’  Understanding an everyday experience a new [engineering] way is what we are trying to achieve.

 

CALE #4 [Creating A Learning Environment: a series of posts based on a workshop given periodically by Pat Campbell and Eann Patterson in the USA supported by NSF and the UK supported by HEA]