This engineering education research initiation grant will create a partnership between engineering and STEM education faculty to investigate how to more efficiently teach engineering students how to become experts in their discipline. The project will use cognitive task analysis, drawing from knowledge of expert engineers, to teach students how better to solve common engineering problems. A solid experimental design is proposed to determine if cognitive task analysis can help transition students more quickly to expert status.
The broader significance and importance of this project is twofold. First, researching how to identify and correct the difficulties students have in applying engineering knowledge to problems, particularly interdisciplinary problems, engineers are more able to address the needs of society. The project also build partnerships between engineering faculty and researchers in learning sciences, which can have broad impact on informing engineering education with more effective practices. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers through preparation of an engineering workforce with new capabilities and expertise. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by creating results and research that are useful for society by informing educational policy and practices.
One of the most important outcomes of engineering education is to prepare students for their careers. These careers, spanning several decades, will require engineers to recall prior technical knowledge, acquire new technical knowledge and skills, and apply them in novel, non-routine ways. The foundational knowledge and skills for these activities are taught in large enrollment, core engineering courses, typically taken in the first two years of study. The main educational challenge, addressed in this work, is to provide the appropriate instructional scaffolding for students such that the acquisition of this knowledge is done effectively and efficiency. Prior research has shown that large cognitive demands are placed on students when acquiring this knowledge and learning how to transfer it into different contexts. To help students manage this transition, instructional support was created using Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA): a tool designed to more completely elicit the problem solving strategies used by expert engineers. The problem solving support was created after conducting in-depth interviews with three engineers who cumulatively had more than 40 years of experience. During each interview, knowledge was collected from the experts, emphasizing the identification of each point in the procedure that requires a decision. The results were iterated until an accurate and comprehensive list of cues were elicited which was then used to inform decision-making at these critical points. The results of the CTA were used in a circuit analysis course at the University of Virginia as part of design problems asked as homework problems. Compared to a control group who did not have the benefit of the instructional scaffolding, student performance was not statistically different in any course measures. This included conceptual knowledge measured by multiple choice questions and applying knowledge to problem solving as measured by midterm and final exam problems. Anecdotally, the instructor noted students demonstrated the use of self-diagnosis in office hour discussions of design problems and on exams. Part of this, we believe, is due to a mismatch between the knowledge elicited from the experts and the problem solving required of students in large enrollment, core engineering courses. Overall, CTA can be an important means of creating instructional scaffolding for helping students improve their problem solving skill. In the future, the results of this work will be applied to first-year and capstone design projects which are more closely aligned to the expertise of the engineers interviewed.
