Statics is one of the fundamental courses required for engineering students, particularly for students in the mechanical, civil and aerospace fields. This course introduces students to modeling and solving real-world systems, including drawing Free Body Diagrams (FBD) and setting up equilibrium equations. These two skills are critical for bridging introductory courses to more advanced courses, such as Dynamics, Mechanics of Materials and others. The process of teaching these foundational skills typically involves giving students opportunities to hone their problem solving skills through homework assignments and exams. In this paper, the authors introduce reflection as a tool to gauge understanding, confidence and performance. This too is used to intervene in homework assignments and exams in order to enhance and improve students' meta-cognitive awareness and self-regulated learning.Homework and exam wrappers are reflection activities that prompt students to review their graded assignments and exams, and encourage students to reconsider their study habits and preparations. In this course, four short self-assessments were designed to help students identify their strengths and weaknesses by reflecting on their performances, the mistakes they made, their confidence in certain concepts, and views on best strategies for completing homework assignments and preparing for take-home exams in the future. Two of these wrappers were implemented after the graded homework assignments were returned to the students, and the other two were part of the exam reflection. At the end of the course, the students completed an anonymous survey about the reflective activities.Analyses focused on several different aspects of the homework and exam wrappers: number of mistakes made, levels of confidence, study strategies and students' satisfaction on their performance. The findings suggest wrappers can have an important impact on students' learning in engineering statics. Quantitative findings highlight several bright spots demonstrating positive impact of wrappers while qualitative findings present a strong argument for the use of wrappers in teaching and learning. Wrappers are also proven to provide the teaching team with information about students' understanding of content and level of skills so that appropriate measures and actions can be taken to help students who are struggling in the course. Future work will include devising reliable quantitative measures for metacognitive skills, gathering more data to obtain a larger sample size, and redesigning of wrappers to optimize mutual benefits for both students and the teaching team.
The focus of Mark's research can broadly be described as "pivot thinking," the cognitive aptitudes and abilities that encourage innovation, and the tension between design engineering and business management cognitive styles. To encourage these thinking patterns in young engineers, Mark has developed a Scenario Based Learning curriculum that attempts to blend core engineering concepts with selected business ideas. Mark is also researches empathy and mindfulness and its impact on gender participation in engineering education. He is a Research Scientist and Lecturer in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and teaches the course ME310x Product Management and ME305 Statistics for Design Researchers.Mark has extensive background in consumer products management, having managed more than 50 consumer driven businesses over a 25-year career with The Procter & Gamble Company. In 2005, he joined Intuit, Inc. as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer and initiated a number of consumer package goods marketing best practices, introduced the use of competitive response modeling and "onthe-fly" A|B testing program to qualify software improvements.Mark is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of One Page Solutions, a consulting firm that uses the OGSP R process to help technology and branded product clients develop better strategic plans. Mark is a member of The Band of Angels, Silicon Valley's oldest organization dedicated exclusively to funding seed stage start-ups. In addition, he serves on the board of several technology start-up companies. Sophia Lerner Pink, Stanford UniversitySophia Pink is a sophomore studying engineering at Stanford University. She began conducting research in Dr. Sheri Sheppard's Designing Education Lab in June 2016. Sophia's academic interests include mechanical engineering, human-centered design and social science research.Kayla Powers, Stanford University Mr. Adrian Piedra, Stanford University Adrian Piedra is pursuing an MS in Mechanical Engineering (ME) at Stanford University. He is a member of the graduate teaching assistants in the ME department at Stanford, and will be assisting with engineering design courses for the duration of his graduate studies. Adrian holds a BS (summa cum laude) in ME from the University of Florida. During his time at the University of Florida, he was a teaching assistant for engineering analysis courses. Ms. Shivani Alexandra Torres, Stanford UniversityShivani is pursuing her MS in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, as a first year Co-Terminal student, exploring intersection of biotechnology, product realization, smart product design, and design for manufacture. She holds B.S. in Bioengineering and a minor in Product Design, with an emphasis in medical device innovation and pre-medical studies. Her interests in education include increasing accessibility of engineering to students of all backgrounds, especially underrepresented minorities, investigating how to encourage young girls and women to get involved with manufacturing, and how me...
IntroductionTechnical writing is an important skill for students to develop by the time of graduation, and effective communication is required of the ABET 2009-10 Criterion 3. In addition to ABET requirement, the industry demand for skilled technical writers is increasing 6 . However, for many engineering students, the act of technical writing can be intimidating. This is especially true if the students are still learning about the topic in question 6 . More exposure to the subject matter is useful in making technical writing a less daunting task. Students need significant practice to become effective communicators upon completion of their degrees. Beginning this education in technical writing early allows students maximizes time spent learning to communicating effectively and efficiently. Much work has been done to investigate the effect of interventions in upperclassmen capstone courses (see bibliography). Additionally, courses which integrate writing and project design instruction are becoming increasingly common 6,8 . This interdisciplinary combination has the potential to give students an experience in technical writing and engineering design closer to that practiced outside of an academic setting 8 .For this paper, the researchers examined the effect of instructional interventions on early engineering students, primarily freshmen and sophomores. The course in question is ENGR 14: Introduction to Solid Mechanics. This is a prerequisite course for many higher level engineering classes which combines communication, project based learning, and technical writing. . There are two longer writing assignments in the course; the assignment we have focused our research on is the second project, P2. This assignment required students to design their own statics research question, solve the problem using topics covered in Introduction to Solid Mechanics, and complete a written summary. This written summary contains an abstract, free body diagrams, final calculations, and a poster presentation. The purpose of the project is to give students experience in designing their own problem and solving it, writing a professional technical paper, and class presentation.The questions that this research seeks to answer are:1. How did the changes in the assignment worksheet affect student work in terms of clear technical writing? 2. What could be added or changed about the assignment to maximize student performance? 3. How will these ideas be implemented for future quarters?This research adds new information to the existing literature because it examines the effect of instruction in technical writing through a project that is not a capstone design course nor requires students to design a working model within certain constraints. BackgroundDesign projects involving technical writing in engineering courses have the potential to provide a learning platform for other essential skills. For example, in Seawright's work with the Texas A&M University's Qatar site 9 , a technical writing opportunity was used to facilitate education in collabo...
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