Background Engineering Faculty members should adopt effective pedagogical approaches in order to maximize student learning. The beliefs of faculty members about instructional practice are an important construct in determining what and how they teach.Purpose This study investigates the effect of faculty members' involvement in model-eliciting activities on their beliefs about classroom instruction. This study is guided by the following research question: How do faculty members' beliefs about teaching, learning, and assessment change through the use of model-eliciting activities (MEAs)?Design/Method Using a multicase study design, four engineering faculty members from across the United States were studied while they developed, implemented, and assessed MEAs. Data were collected from sources including semistructured interviews about teaching beliefs and practices, a demographics and academic background survey, and biweekly surveys on MEA implementation and beliefs. Yearly interviews were coded using a rubric that classifies beliefs on a scale from instructor-centered to student-centered.
ResultsOver the course of the three-year study, the beliefs of all four faculty members shifted towards a more student-centered view of teaching. The faculty members indicated that they were able to emphasize teamwork, real-world practice, problem-solving skills, timely feedback, constructed knowledge, communication, active learning, formative assessment, and the discipline of engineering through the use of MEAs.
ConclusionsThis study provides evidence that developing and implementing MEAs can help both experienced and beginning faculty members change their beliefs toward a studentcentered view of instruction.
Online discussion forums have emerged as a popular Web application to build and support online communities for numerous engineering interest areas and practice. However, a review of engineering education literature reveals scant research on the use of online discussion forums for engineering learning beyond the classroom. This study addresses this gap in knowledge through a study of the "Homework Help" section on AllAboutCircuits.com to examine what students sought help for and for what purpose. We downloaded over 6,000 discussion messages spanning over 8 years and extracted the textual data with a Python program. Instead of analyzing the data through manual means, we utilized the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) to capture textual patterns and leverage a topic modeling approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, to identify connected clusters of words. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis was also used to determine how often students use words associated with cognitive processes. We found that the homework help section of informal online discussion forums cater to students seeking help on fundamental ECE topics. Our findings also suggest that online discussion forums are supportive learning environments, as students freely engage in meaningful inquiries and social interactions with other learners.
In online communities a few experts are able to help a large number of help-seekers -whether in Q&A communities or other forms of online forums. How is this efficiency achieved? How useful is this help? We show that expert help-giving can be characterized as: (1) Fast -Most active help-givers gave response promptly and were most responsive during peak activity; (2) Functional -There was little duplication of help-giving effort; and, (3) FittingInitial responses were of high quality and reduced the need for further clarifications and corrections; high quality responses were provided earlier in the thread. Examination of differences across experts revealed that the most highly rated group of experts responded to 69% of the questions with a median response time of 16 minutes, twice as fast as other experts. Finally, we demonstrate the high quality of response through a taxonomy that characterizes expert responses as: framing, guiding, or engaged help.
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