Research on Engineering Student Knowing: Trends and Opportunities

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2005 by Turns, Jennifer, Atman, Cynthia J, Adams, Robin S, Barker, Theresa

ABSTRACT

What could we know about engineering student knowing? The answer to this question represents a form of scholarship of discovery in engineering education and a valuable complement to scholarship of teaching work in the field. To illustrate the state of this scholarship, we present twelve studies and analyze these studies across aspects of knowledge, level of experience, and research approach. We then use these analyses to identify trends in the existing research and opportunities for future research.

Keywords: knowing, learning, assessment

I. INTRODUCTION

In the engineering education community, we continually strive to improve the education we provide for our students. Current efforts include programs to prepare a diverse cadre of engineers, increased accountability about how effectively engineering programs prepare engineering students, and an interest in preparing engineers to function in a global community with ethical and professional responsibility. The community is responding with strategies such as emphasizing pedagogies known to be effective for diverse learners (e.g., cooperative learning), adopting new policies (e.g., the ABET outcome-based accreditation), creating new research centers devoted to engineering education issues, and other equally exciting developments. Underlying many of these efforts is a recognition and desire to be more learner-centered in our engineering education practices by ensuring that our educational practices recognize the characteristics of our learners.

This paper explores a type of fundamental research that is core to all of these efforts-research on what engineering students know about topics central to engineering. Such research represents one aspect of a scholarship of discovery for engineering education and is an important complement to the growing body of work in the scholarship of teaching [1-4]. To illustrate why and how this research is so critical, consider an analogy to the basic process of engineering. It is widely recognized that information about natural/social phenomena is valuable for design efforts that involve that phenomena. For example, Nike engineers might conduct research on the forces experienced by a foot during different types of sports (the phenomenon) to inform the design of new types of sports shoes (the design activity). Similarly, biomedical engineers would certainly want to have a detailed understanding of how the heart functions (the phenomenon) to design and develop interventions that support individuals with heart conditions (the design activity). In this vein, we can see the need for knowing what students know (the phenomena) to design educational experiences, assessments, etc. (the design activity). Thus, we should clearly be interested in research that sheds light on the phenomenon, in this case research on what engineering students know about topics central to engineering.

In this paper, we investigate the state of a scholarship of discovery on engineering student knowing. We have not aimed for a comprehensive review. Rather, we present a selective sample of papers that illustrates research on what engineering students know and then discuss themes represented by the collection of papers. We hope the information included in this paper not only illustrates this type of research, but also demonstrates the scope of research that is possible, generates ideas about specific research projects, helps to calibrate expectations about the amount of effort involved in this research, and excites engineering educators about the possibility of contributing to this growing research area.

The paper is organized as follows. Section II presents basic ideas that underlie the paper-current perspectives on what it means to know, thoughts on why research on knowing is valuable and how it can affect educational practice, and ideas about how researchers can approach the investigation of student knowledge. Section III and section IV describe our strategy for identifying a sample of studies on engineering student knowing, report on an analysis of these studies along three factors (aspect of knowing, level of experience, and research approach), and use the results of the analyses to speculate on future research opportunities. In section V we conclude the paper with some summary remarks.

II. BACKGROUND ON ENGINEERING STUDENT KNOWING

Ideas about what engineering students know, what aspects of knowledge are important to engineering, and how to best gain insight into that knowledge underlie much of what members of the engineering education community already do. Consider the following scenarios:

* When an educator in a dynamics class decides on the appropriate balance of concept and problem-solving questions for a test and is able to construct questions that productively discriminate among the students, this reflects a sense of some basic types of knowledge and the level of knowledge students are likely to display.

* When communication instructors bring a practicing engineer into the classroom to address an anticipated misconception (e.g., disbelief about the importance of communication in engineering), they are using an awareness of common misconceptions to make instructional choices.