Professional Development on Giving Feedback on Design for Engineering Students and Educators

Abstract

a member of Purdue's Teaching Academy. Since 1999, she has been a faculty member within the FirstYear Engineering Program, teaching and guiding the design of one of the required first-year engineering courses that engages students in open-ended problem solving and design. Her research focuses on the development, implementation, and assessment of modeling and design activities with authentic engineering contexts. She is currently a member of the educational team for the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). Professional Development on Giving Feedback on Design for Engineering Students and Educators AbstractThe goal of this project is to create professional development materials for students, engineers, and engineering educators on giving feedback on engineering design. To achieve this goal, we first characterized and compared engineering students and educators' feedback on design and then used these comparisons to create professional development materials. In these professional development materials, we highlighted the differences between students' (i.e., novices) and engineering educators' (i.e., experts) feedback and emphasized how novices can provide feedback similar to experts. We implemented multiple professional development workshops using these materials. Since the feedback profiles for novices and experts were different, we encouraged the workshop participants to identify their feedback profile and try to provide feedback similar to experts.