Engineering - Electrical (55) This project is implementing findings from research on note-taking strategies and metacognition to enhance students' learning in engineering courses. To this end, the project is developing a set of enhanced guided notes (EGNs) for a sophomore level electrical engineering for non-majors course. Enhanced guided notes are instructor-prepared-notes with spaces available for students to add comments and other annotations during and after the class. In addition, the EGNs require students to assess their metacognitive knowledge, create additional electronic notes of their own, and then share them with their classmates. The project has five goals: (1) to develop EGNs for classroom instruction on electric circuit concepts; (2) to implement EGNs in the electrical engineering for non-majors at Utah State University; (3) to evaluate and compare the learning performance of students who use the EGNs and those who use standard guided notes; (4) to understand the students' use of their metacognitive knowledge during engineering classroom lectures; (5) to understand how students' note-taking skills are improved through their engagement in collaborative online note-taking activities; and (6) develop guidelines for the creation and implementation of enhanced guided notes. The project includes rigorous formative and summative evaluation plans with both qualitative and quantitative components coordinated by an independent evaluator. The project's results are being disseminated through conferences and journal publications and the EGNs and other course materials are being made available for free download from the project's website.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE "This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content." The project is a design-based research to develop a new type of instructional materials and strategies for their use in an electric circuits course for students who are not electrical engineering majors. As many studies found that students lack the encoding skills needed for taking notes during lectures, the primarily objective of this project was to help students utilize the lecture time more effectively for learning and to improve their note-taking skills. Intellectual Merit: This project is developing new learning materials and strategies designed to replace traditional note-taking as the unstructured recording of lecture content using paper and pencil. Unlike the guided notes introduced in many studies, the enhanced guided notes (EGN) developed by this study include two new additional components that are not present in the standard guided notes. These two new components ensure that students engage in learning. First, the EGN include questions that prompt students to assess their metacognitive knowledge. They appear throughout the guided notes, including the introduction of each topic, elaboration of the theoretical concepts, and during problem-solving. Second, the guided notes were further enhanced through the inclusion of outside class activities. This study was implemented in four phases to accomplish the goal: (1) development of the EGN (i.e., electronic and paper-based guided notes); (2) implementation of the EGN and the collaborative note-taking; (3) data analysis; and (4) findings dissemination. As the researcher utilized a design-based research approach for this project, they made continuous improvement throughout each phase. The development activities were mainly focused on the efforts to continue improving the EGN. Findings revealed positive impacts of the use of EGN on student performance and metacognitive strategies in questionnaire-item level, specifically monitoring and regulating strategies. Our findings also found that metacognitive strategies between electronic and paper-based EGN groups were relatively similar. Moreover, the results of this project showed that the students were appreciate with the teaching innovation using the guided notes. Positive and constructive comments were gathered from students who used electronic and paper-based EGN. Phenomenological data analysis suggested that the use of EGN helped students to learn electric circuit concepts in comparison to traditional learning in a classroom. The project has an external evaluator that assesses progress of the project and provides formative feedback. Broader Impacts: Enhanced guided notes have potential to be used in other engineering majors. Also, the electronic version of EGN has potential to be used in online engineering education or distance-learning mode. Electronic version of EGN may provide insights into the development of electronic learning modules, especially electric circuits modules. Moreover, project findings were published in journal publication and presented in ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education and ASEE annual conferences. Overview of project outcomes and list of publications as a result of this project were published in a webpage. Publications Produced As a Result of This Research Lawanto, O., & Santoso, H. B. (2013). Self-regulated learning strategies of engineering college students while learning electric circuit concepts with the enhanced guided notes. International Education Studies, 6(3), 88-104. Lawanto, O., & Harry Santoso. (2013). Investigating students’ self-regulated learning while learning electric circuit concepts with enhanced guided notes. Paper presented at the ASEE annual conference, Atlanta, GA. Santoso, H., & Lawanto, O. (2013). Shared note-taking using electronic enhanced guided notes: Peer-review activity, performance, and self-regulated learning skills. Paper Presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education annual conference, Oklahoma City, OK. Lawanto, O., & Santoso, H. B. (2013). Students’ collaborative note-taking activities while using electronic and paper based enhanced-guided notes: Viewed from metacognitive and social network perspectives. Paper Presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education annual conference, Oklahoma City, OK. Lawanto, O., & Santoso, H. B. (2012). Work in progress: Implementation of enhanced guided notes and collaborative note-taking in learning electric circuit concepts. Paper presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education annual conference, Seattle, WA. Lawanto, O., & Santoso, H. B. (2012). Implementation of enhanced guided notes to promote students’ metacognitive self-regulated learning strategies while learning electric circuit concepts. Paper presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education annual conference, Seattle, WA. Lawanto, O., Schreuders, P., Holton, D, & Dorward, J. (2011). Work in progress: Promoting metacognitive knowledge and shared note-taking to learn electric circuit concepts through enhanced guide notes. Paper presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education annual conference, Rapid City, SD.
