This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This engineering education research award to Carnegie Mellon University will develop new analytical methods to study learning in engineering project teams. These methods will be based on the recent theoretical findings from the study of group cognition. The specific research objectives are to create analytic tools that automatically detect and tag evidence of learning events in group discussions and that summarize the evolving content of the documents created by a group. The project will also create visualization tools that integrate and summarize the team communication to track the emergence of a shared solution. The results will be presented at technical conferences and published in professional journals. The goal of this research is to better prepare students for the practice of engineering through developing tools to enhance team work skills. These techniques are expected to increase students' interest in engineering and will enhance the number who complete engineering degrees and are ready to fill engineering jobs.
