This project develops and promotes the use of a cyber-enabled infrastructure, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Concept Warehouse, that could be used throughout the core chemical engineering curriculum (Material and Energy Balances, Thermodynamics, Transport Phenomena, Kinetics and Reactor Design, and Materials Science). The goal is to create a community of learning focused on concept-based instruction, within the discipline of chemical engineering. Conceptual questions, both as Concept Inventories and Concept Tests, will be available through an interactive website maintained through the Education Division of the AIChE, the discipline's major professional society. It uses a flexible, query-driven information storage system so that conceptual learning can be deployed by programs and instructors as it best fits into their curriculum and culture. The overall objective is to lower the barrier for using concept-based instruction and assessment so that more chemical engineering faculty incorporate concept-based learning into their classes. Workshops will be offered to faculty and department administrators to explain the value and methods of concept-based instruction.
This project designed, implemented and tested the Chemical Engineering Concept Warehouse, an on line repository of questions on important chemical engineering concepts comprising all topical areas of the discipline. Our work is motivated by the need to make available to chemical engineering faculty a large, high-quality collection of easily accessible concept questions for use in the classroom. These questions are designed to identify persistent misconceptions in students and to measure whether classroom interventions have repaired any of the misconceptions. On-going research has shown that misconceptions are common in engineering students and that some are resistant to self-correction by students without focused and targeted instruction and use of appropriate technology-driven pedagogies and curricular materials. Interventions cannot be developed without knowing what misconceptions student have and the efficacy of each intervention can not be measured without using high-quality concept questions such as the ones available in the Concept Warehouse developed in this project. The Warehouse currently contains over 2500 concept questions focused on all important chemical engineering topics and addition questions are added on an on-going basis. Several hundred chemical engineering faculty are registered as users of Warehouse materials and many of these faculty have attended workshops sponsored by this project. Users are encouraged to add their own concept questions to help expand the database of questions -- each question is reviewed by chemical engineering experts before inclusion in the database and users are encouraged to provide ratings of questions they use. Students who use questions are also surveyed to collect data which can be used to improve or replace questions as needed. In the long term, results of this project will have a positive impact on how well students learn chemical engineering concepts. A focus on conceptual learning rather than just algorithmic problem-solving techniques will produce better engineering graduates since concept formation is an important marker in the development of engineering expertise. In addition to continuing to populate the Warehouse will additional chemical engineering questions, future support from NSF will be sought to expand the question database to other disciplines starting with mechanical engineering. The long term vision is to the create a website in which college faculty from virtually any discipline can find the resources to promote concept learning in their courses. We will all benefit from such a result.
