A Learning Community of University Freshman Design, Freshman Graphics, and High School Technology Students: Description, Projects, and Assessment

Abstract

A learning community was developed to enhance the teamwork and communication components of a freshman design course. The learning community was comprised of students from a freshman design course, a freshman graphics course, and a high school technology course. Design teams were formed by combining three to four students from each of these courses. These teams were required to research, design, build, and test a specified product. The high school and university students communicated only using e-mails and Internet conferencing. This paper outlines how the learning community is implemented, describes three design projects, and presents the assessment methods. Assessment reveals that university students who participate in the learning community have a better understanding and confidence in the technical aspects of the design project than the students who do not participate in the learning community. It also reveals that high school participants display notable interest in the engineering design process.Keywords: learning community, freshman design, high school I. INTRODUCTIONCollaborative learning and the use of a learning community has long been a goal of design curriculums. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has embraced these ideas with Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) programs that encourage formation of learning communities and inter-institutional collaboration, such as collaboration between universities and K-12 schools. Pedagogical studies show that students simply learn more if they are actively involved in the learning process [1,2] and if they interact with other students [3]. Collaboration and interaction within a learning community are especially important in engineering design. Engineering design requires synthesis-a process that is greatly enhanced when students collaborate with others who have ideas different from their own.One common feature of traditional design courses is that they are taught with design teams comprised of students attending the same class and having similar educational backgrounds. Such courses do not teach students how to work on design teams where members may have significantly different technical backgrounds or may be located at different geographical locations. Collaboration with others from diverse backgrounds and locations is an important part of the learning process and common in "real-world" design practice. This is the problem specifically targeted in the learning community presented in this paper.Development of the learning community was funded by an NSF-CCLI Adaptation and Implementation grant [4,5]. It is based on an established freshman design curriculum described in [6] but adds a curriculum coordination component between the design class, a university graphics course and a high school technology course. The objective of this NSF project was to develop: (1) a pilot program that demonstrates how the learning community can be implemented; (2) several projects that can be used with this learning community; and (3) both direct and indirect assessment...

Student perceptions of higher education science and engineering learning communities

“…Hence, institutional calls for reduction in such costly learning activities should be resisted (Laws 1996). From the perspective of the student participants here, interactive practical classes thus seem to facilitate learning of practical science and engineering skills (as supported by Nakhleh et al 2002); enhance a sense of belonging (see Laws 1996); and, if open-ended in nature, help students come to an appreciation of the nature of science (Havdala and Ashkenazi 2007;Matthews 1998;Metz 1998) as viewed by their teachers (Brown and Melear 2006); and what it means to work like a professional engineer (Rutar and Mason 2005) or scientist (Désautels and Larochelle 1998;Eames 2002;Eames and Bell 2005).…”

“…There would, thus, appear to be a clear need for finding ways of establishing relationships and a sense of belonging to the community early on, along the lines described above. First-year class sizes do mitigate against this, lectures do not need to be passive learning affairs (Hativa 2000;Justi 2003) and could, for example, include break-out group discussion sessions (Ogbern 1997;Rutar and Mason 2005) which facilitates more student-student and studentstaff interactions and might go some way towards addressing this issue (Hativa 2000).…”

“…Much of what is reported here for science learning communities is echoed in the literature for engineering higher education learning communities. It does seem, however, that in engineering there is more interactive learning and more design project-or inquiry-based learning (Rutar and Mason 2005), with more emphasis on cooperative team work and communication (Prince 2004).…”

Innovation in linking and thinking: Critical thinking and writing skills of first-year engineering students in a learning community

“…Stassen [32] found that linked course learning communities were effective across campus to keep at-risk students in school and for the quality of social and academic integration. Rutar and Mason [24] found that pairings of college engineering students with high school technology students both facilitated understanding and confidence in the technical aspects of design for the college students and increased interest in engineering design from the high school students. First year programs have been a very amenable place for development of learning communities as they are seen as "a promising strategy for creating knowable communities that make a new place, and especially a large place, more welcoming and more navigable" [31].…”

“…Several universities are exploring ways of knowing that engineers engage in [11][12][13][14][15][16] as well as ways of learning [5,16,17], which help us think about processing and its relationship to critical thinking. There have been studies done in writing and critical thinking [18][19][20][21] and the close pairing of courses in learning communities [5,9,15,17,[22][23][24]. The work that has been done in the engineering context with writing has included current theories of writing to learn [5,6,17,23], as well as the importance of informal writing such as journal writing [5,8,25,26].…”