PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS: University of Massachusetts Boston (Lead) University of Nebraska-Lincoln
CORE AREA(s): STEM Learning/STEM Learning Environments - Undergraduate Education
PROJECT DESCRIPTION The project is studying the abstraction capacity in problem solving among undergraduate students in two STEM disciplines. The three-year project involves faculty and students in electrical engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and in chemistry at University of Massachusetts Boston. The study is examining two courses in each discipline (that typically occur in the sophomore and junior years) for evidence of an abstraction threshold - the gap in reasoning ability that can be crossed by students. The project is seeking to characterize reasoning applied to problem solving using a cognitive processing model, Representation Mapping.
The study tests two hypotheses: 1) Many students do not have fully mature processes for abstraction, i.e., cognitive supply, and it is possible to measure what their processes are and the degree to which they are capable of reasoning using abstraction. 2) Somewhere in each undergraduate STEM curriculum, cognitive demand increases to the point where a typical students current capacity for abstraction is not matched to the complexity of problems posed, and this impacts student performance.
The research questions being studied are: RQ1: How can students problem solving processes and degree of abstraction in two different STEM disciplines - electrical engineering and chemistry - be characterized using Representation Mapping? RQ2: What evidence is there that abstraction thresholds exist in undergraduate electrical engineering and chemistry curricula? RQ3: What are discipline-specific nuances of abstraction in electrical engineering and chemistry education?
This theory-driven project involves a rigorous interdisciplinary study that has the potential to significantly advance the understanding of how students reason when solving problems associated with deep concepts in STEM disciplines. The effort is in direct alignment the report from the National Academies on Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER), which includes "Interdisciplinary studies of cross-cutting concepts and cognitive processes" as one of its four overall recommendations for promising directions in studying undergraduate STEM education. The project is making significant contributions to the knowledge base on how to increase students' problem solving approaches and is helping to uncover how domain-general and discipline-dependent cognitive processing interact in two STEM disciplines.
BROADER SIGNIFICANCE As manifest by its strong alignment with the DBER report, the project is an area of national interest. The project is uncovering commonalities of abstraction in two STEM disciplines and clarifying differences in abstraction between the disciplines. This effort is providing fundamental insights to support how instructors can capitalize on commonalities and deliberately provide avenues for students to practice discipline-dependent reasoning strategies in problem solving.
Situating the data collection in two very different universities - a traditional research university in the Midwest and a majority minority non-traditional university in the Northeast - lends greater potential relevance to the findings, which is being widely disseminated at high profile conferences in both science and engineering education. An interdisciplinary study is producing results that are more readily transferred to other STEM disciplines, thus enhancing their potential for broad adoption.
