The goal of the project is to use the iPod Touch to transform an introductory material science and engineering (MSE) course from a deductive practice to an inductive teaching and learning environment. The investigators are developing six multi-part MSE education applications for the iPod Touch that are designed to facilitate and support six new collaborative and innovative active learning modules that target specific student learning objectives which are known to be challenging for many students in MSE courses. They hypothesize that using these active modules in collaborative groups with data, visuals, audio, and information from the iPod Touch, will lead to improvements in student learning, engagement and retention, especially for women and other underrepresented groups in engineering technology programs. MSE education applications for this project are being freely disseminated through the Apple Applications store and are available to all others on the web as a Wiki. The evaluation effort, under the direction of an outside evaluator, is using pre- and post-course concept evaluations, grades on exams and research papers, and primary trait analyses on these student products. Broader impacts include a significant dissemination effort and the focus on underrepresented groups.
The iCollaborate Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) project was a multiyear, multifaceted research project to understand how student learning outcomes, student engagement, and successful course completion rates in introductory MSE courses were affected by a variety of activities that were based upon best practices from STEM education research. A number of interventions and active techniques were used in the classroom, at first, singularly and, as the project progressed, in various combinations. Overall, the basic principles implemented in the project were supported by theory based in cognitive and social constructivism and the substantial body of evidence that favors collaborative learning and the inductive approach over the traditional lecture driven, deductive teaching. We found that students come to the course with different levels of preparation and that scores in prerequisite courses do matter, but grades were not always perfect indicators that key information from those courses was retained. Students enter the course with a wide range of learning styles, and some prerequisite information was retained or learned differently. Based on our findings, we recommend that every instructor evaluate the prerequisite knowledge of their students and complete active, targeted interventions aimed at known robust misconceptions and discovered local knowledge gaps. The first component of the iCollaborate project was to shift the structure in MSE engineering course from deductive practice to an inductive teaching and learning environment, while testing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support. Every intervention developed as part of this project was designed to build scaffolds by connecting new fundamental MSE principles to the existing knowledge base of students, which was determined by mining several years of course data from pre-course concept questionnaires, exams, and quizzes. The following Apps for the iPod Touch test platform were tested for iCollaborate: Vocabulary, Basic Knowledge Building, Concept Questions, skill Tune-Up, graphical Materials Properties, a unit conversion tool for basic MSE courses, and a tool to calculate the Elastic Constant of Unidirectional composites. Three web App tools were developed for the web site: Materials Properties, Vocabulary, and Tune-Up. While the students enjoyed the collaborative work in the classroom and the team assignments with the iPod Apps, many of them wished for more practice. Thus, we constructed a concept based web site. The web apps were built from a review/personal resource perspective, while the iPod Apps were built for a collaborative, active learning environment. The web site is: www.wwu.edu/icollaborate/. When compared to a totally deductive approach, successful course completion rates improved between 10-12% (depending on the term). The top and next tier scores on exams remained flat. The top students engaged in the collaborative learning experiences and iPod App modules, and their check out rates of individual devices was very high. Their mastery scores did not change significantly in the course, but their engagement was certainly improved. Overall, results were flat for the next tier students and their participation rate was unchanged. These students had enough resources to do relatively well in the class (B range) and did not seek out additional time on the devices. However, the student engagement was much different for the students who had traditionally struggled with the class or dropped out. The struggling students checked out individual iPods at a rate as high as the top students and actively participated in the collaborative experiences. These students became engaged in their own learning and their success rates improved. They did not give up on difficult design problems; instead, they persisted! Course completion rates rose and mid-term drop-rates declined sharply. With regard to particular student learning outcomes, some individual questions on the two traditional mid-term exams and the final exam showed improvements. The collaborative work combined with the MatProp App improved the ability of the students to rank order material properties by classification, especially density, elastic constant, tensile strength, and coefficient of thermal expansion. Improvements were also made in the conceptual understanding of specific tensile strength and specific elastic constant. It was possible to successfully reconstruct misconceptions regarding metallic bonding. Scores on the open-ended design problem remained relatively flat on the first mid-term. Scores did improve on the final design problem. And collaboratively completed term research papers showed considerable conceptual improvements. Overall, the students were able to understand the relationships between the collaborative assignments, the low stakes quizzes, and the mini-lectures in helping them reconstruct conceptual knowledge. When all three interventions in the course were present, there were too many resources and too many different activities the students could complete. The top students were frustrated because they wanted to complete every single activity many times. The struggling students sometimes did not understand how to choose modules and review sessions to optimize learning. Based on our research results on student learning outcomes and course completion rates, we conclude that providing any two of the three interventions plus a live instructor produced approximately equally good results.
