Tag Archives: learning environment

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]

Everyday examples contribute to successful learning

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Some weeks ago I quoted Adams and Felder [2008] who said that the ‘educational role of faculty [academic staff] is not to impart knowledge; but to design learning environments that support…knowledge acquisition’ [see ‘Creating an evolving learning environment’ on February 21st, 2018].  A correspondent asked how I create a learning environment and, in response, this is the first in a series of posts on the topic that will appear every third week.  The material is taken from a one-day workshop that Pat Campbell [of Campbell-Kibler Associates] and I have given periodically in the USA [supported by NSF ] and UK [supported by HEA] for engineering academics.

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that ‘knowledge is experience, everything else is just information’.  I believe that a key task for a university teacher of engineering is to find the common experiences of their students and use them to illustrate engineering principles.  This is relatively straightforward for senior students because they will have taken courses or modules delivered by your colleagues; however, it is more of a challenge for students entering the first year of an engineering programme.  Everyone is unique and a product of their formative conditions, which makes it tricky to identify common experiences that can be used to explain engineering concepts.  The Everyday Engineering Examples, which feature on a page of this blog [https://realizeengineering.blog/everyday-engineering-examples/], were developed to address the need for illustrative situations that would fall into the experience of most, if not all, students.  Two popular examples are using the splits in sausages when you cook them to illustrate two-dimensional stress systems in pressure vessels [see lesson plan S11] and using a glass to extinguish a birthday candle on a cup cake to explain combustion processes [see lesson plan T11].

Everyday Engineering Examples were developed as part of an educational research project, which was funded by the US National Science Foundation [see ENGAGE] and demonstrated that this approach to teaching works.  The project found that significantly more students rated their learning with Everyday Engineering Examples as high or significant than in the control classes independent of the level of difficult involved [Campbell et al. 2008].  So, this is one way in which I create a learning environment that supports knowledge acquisition.  More in future posts…

References

Adams RS & Felder RM, Reframing professional development: A systems approach to preparing engineering educators to educate tomorrow’s engineers. J. Engineering Education, 97(3):230-240, 2008

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 #1 [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]

Creating an evolving learning environment

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about marking examinations and my tendency to focus on the students that I had failed to teach rather than those who excelled in their knowledge of problem-solving with the laws of thermodynamics [see my post ‘Depressed by exams‘ on January 31st, 2018].  One correspondent suggested that I shouldn’t beat myself up because ‘to teach is to show, to learn is to acquire‘; and that I had not failed to show but that some of my students had failed to acquire.  However, Adams and Felder have stated that the ‘educational role of faculty is not to impart knowledge; but to design learning environments that support knowledge acquisition‘.  My despondency arises from my apparent inability to create a learning environment that supports and encourages knowledge acquisition for all of my students.  People arrive in my class with a variety of formative experiences and different ways of learning, which makes it challenging to generate a learning environment that is effective for everyone.   It’s an on-going challenge due to the ever-widening cultural gap between students and their professors, which is large enough to have warranted at least one anthropological study (see My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan). So, my focus on the weaker exam scripts has a positive outcome because it causes me to think about evolving the learning environment.

Sources:

Adams RS, Felder RM, Reframing professional development: A systems approach to preparing engineering educators to educate tomorrow’s engineers. J. Engineering Education, 97(3):230-240, 2008.

Nathan R, My freshman year: what a professor learned by becoming a student, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2005