Background: Evidence shows that students who are actively engaged with learning materials demonstrate greater learning gains than those who are passively engaged. Indeed, cognitive engagement is often cited as a critical component of an educational experience. However, understanding how and in what ways cognitive engagement occurs remains a challenge for engineering educators. In particular, there exists a need to measure and evaluate engagement in ways that provide information for instructors to deploy concrete, actionable steps to foster students' cognitive engagement. The present study reports the development and gathering of validation evidence for a quantitative instrument to measure students' in-class cognitive engagement. The instrument was informed by Wylie and Chi's ICAP (Interactive Constructive Active Passive) model of active learning, as well as contextual concerns within engineering courses. Results: The process followed the classical measurement model of scale development. We provide a detailed overview of the item development and scale validation processes, focusing on the creation of individual subscales to measure different modes of cognition within learning contexts. Multiple rounds of testing the student course cognitive engagement instrument (SCCEI) in college engineering courses provided evidence of validity. This indicated the reliable measurement of student cognitive engagement in the context of notetaking, processing material, and interacting with peers in the classroom. Results suggest differentiating modes of cognitive engagement is indeed applicable when considering students' in-class notetaking and processing of material. Conclusions: Findings point towards the need for additional engagement scales that expand the instrument's ability to distinguish between particular activities within a mode of engagement as defined by ICAP. The present study contributes to the growing body of literature on cognitive engagement of engineering students. Results address the development of measurement tools with evidence of validity for use in STEM education.
respectively. He has done and published research in the areas of additive manufacturing and the design of optimized electronic systems. His current research interests include instructional design and innovations in teaching electrical and electronics engineering core courses.
Eliciting students' conceptual understanding of electric circuits has been discussed as challenging to achieve owing to difficulties faced by students when learning circuit concepts. This difficulty has been attributed to the posit that students tend to hold very little formal preconceptions of electricity. This then becomes problematic as the level of complexity increases from the most basic to more advanced circuit concepts. This lack of formal prior knowledge has the potential to prevent students from being able to assimilate new material they come in contact with when instructed about electric circuit concepts. Other impeding factors reported have been the influence of students' prior misconceptions, the abstract nature of the content, inadequate instructional strategies to provoke conceptual conflict and inadequate preparation of students from pre-requisite courses. However, a gap that still exists is the direct interaction between: (1) students' prior knowledge, (2) the types of learning activities and (3) the design of the learning environment fueled by the decisions made by professors on how to teach circuit concepts.This study focused on exploring undergraduate electrical engineering students' conceptual understanding of electric circuits based on the previously noted interaction. This study was conducted using three distinctive approaches: firstly, to investigate the influence of prior knowledge about other circuit phenomena when learning about more complex scientific concepts, secondly to examine the role of learning environments and student activities on students' understanding of these concepts and thirdly to study the design and dissemination of knowledge about electric circuits in an introductory course. The overarching findings of this study deal primarily with the design of introductory courses having alignment between content, assessment and pedagogy. This alignment has direct impact on the decisions made about the teaching and application of content, design of the learning environment and how the content is communicated to the students. Findings have indicated the misalignment that exist between the three core areas of learning in course design. These results have theoretical and practical significance to the field of engineering as well as contribute to the body of literature on complex circuits such as alternating current (AC) circuits and students' conceptual understanding. The core findings of the three studies independently and collectively have the ability to significantly impact the way future engineers are taught introductory concepts in their respective disciplines.
Town. Her research on the student experience of learning, focusing mainly on science and engineering education, has been published across a range of journal articles in higher education and her recent book, Researching student learning in higher education: A social realist approach published in 2013 by Routledge. She holds an academic development post in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCT, and teaches in the undergraduate programme there. She is a coordinating editor for the international journal Higher Education and a co-editor for the Routledge/SRHE series Research into Higher Education.
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