Assessing First-year Students' Ability to Critically Reflect and Build on Their Team Experiences

Abstract

University of New Hampshire where he focused on student learning and student motivation during the high school to college transition. He initiated and developed a first-year seminar course at Olin College, a course that focuses on working in teams, diversity, and self-directed learning. He enjoys collaborating with other faculty members in the classroom and is invested in research, classes and assignments that provide overlap and continuity within the engineering curriculum and engineering pipeline. Nick is also a mentor for the REU program at Olin which studies the educational experiences of undergraduate engineers. Chris Aaron Gewirtz, Rose-Hulman Institute of TechnologyI'm currently a senior-year Engineering Physics student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Though I've enjoyed the technical work I've done, and devote myself now to my senior design project, I feel that education research has much to offer me, and that I have much to offer it. I think the combination of science or engineering with education provides an opportunity for me to apply my scientific curiosity towards understanding and helping people, a better opportunity than I could have predicted before doing this research.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2015Page 26.241.1Assessing first-year students' ability to critically reflect and build on their team experiences AbstractUndergraduate engineering students are more likely than ever to find themselves working on project-based team assignments. This pedagogical shift toward project-based team learning environments has raised a number of questions for faculty including questions about what firstyear students are learning about themselves and their teammates while they are participating in project-based team assignments. In this study, first-year undergraduate engineering students watched a video of themselves during a design team meeting for a project-based course. They were then asked to analyze the video using one of five prompts and to provide evidence-based suggestions and feedback for themselves and their team. Using a coding framework delineated from Mezirow's theory of transformative learning, ordinal levels of self-reflection were assigned to each self-reflection essay: non-reflection (lowest level of reflection), understanding, reflection, and critical reflection (highest level of reflection). After evaluating the essays, 6% (3) of the selfreflection essays were assessed as non-reflection, 29% (15) were labeled as understanding, 58% (30) earned an evaluation of reflective, and 8% (4) were classified as critically reflective. The five self-reflection prompts provided no statistically significant difference between the levels of reflection received (chi-squared = 1.99, df = 4, p-value = 0.74). Women may show a trend of achieving higher levels of reflection than men (W = 258.5, p-value = 0.10). Viability of assessing levels of reflection is discussed. Suggestions for future self-reflection prompts are provided. Qualitative characteristics of critical reflectors are given.

Supporting Diversity in Teams Through Asset Mapping

“…Having students engage in peer assessment supports them to develop a better understanding of team skills and their own strengths and weaknesses [25]. To support first-year undergraduates to develop improved design team skills, faculty assigned students to review and reflect on a video of one of their design team meetings [26]. They coded students' reflections based on Mezirow's theory of transformative learning [27], findings that over 60% of students were able to reach higher levels of reflection.…”

Women’s Unique Challenges in the Transitions to Engineering Work

“…Prior research also supports this. Women may be more reflective about their challenges than men [21], perhaps because their challenges prompt them to reflection, and they do not have the privilege of navigating their field without reflection [22]. This also may explain the increased amount of mentions of "Leadership" challenges, as opposed to the presence of a unique challenge.…”