NSF Young Investigator

9358516 ATMAN工程教育的初学者应该1)激发学生的兴趣，使他/她留在工程学领域，2)为学生提供学习如何在快速技术变化的世界中成功发挥作用的基础。作为应对这些挑战的一种方式，许多工程学院正在改变他们的课程，将现实的工程问题纳入学生们在大一解决的问题。这些可以是长达一学期的工程设计项目，也可以是本质上开放的较短的问题。通过让新生工程师解决开放式问题，我们将为他们提供模拟现实世界的体验，但在这本书中，我们没有研究基础来为工程学教授提供建议，他们必须指导学生通过工程设计过程的模棱两可的过程。我们能期望一名新工程师在解决开放式问题的同时，从工程过程中提取什么？学生是否将在一道题中学到的知识应用到下一道题中？这项工作的目的是记录新手工程师在遇到模棱两可的笔端设计问题时所采取的解决问题的方法。这将通过一系列有声思考的研究来实现，这些研究考察了工科学生解决开放式问题的策略的各个方面。这些数据将回答这样的问题：1)好学生和差学生在研究案例研究材料和解决开放式问题的方法上有什么不同？2)这两个学生群体的工程设计问题的方法与经验丰富的工程师有什么不同？3)工程专业的学生在学习关于设计问题的案例研究材料时是否会产生自我解释，这是否有助于他们在设计任务中提高表现？这些问题的答案将有助于建立一个研究基础，在此基础上制定教学策略建议，以促进工科学生的学习。***

9358516 Atman Engineering education for the beginning student should 1)engage the student's interest so he/she will stay in engineering and 2)provide the student with a foundation for learning how to function successfully in a world of rapid technological change. As a way to meet these challenges, many engineering schools are changing their curricula to include realistic engineering problems for students to solve in their freshman year. These can be semester long engineering design projects or shorter problems that are open-ended in nature. By giving freshman engineers open-ended problems to solve, we will provide them with a simulated real world experience, but at this print we have no research base from which to provide recommendations for the engineering professors who must guide students through the ambiguity of the engineering design process. What can we expect a freshman engineer to extract about the engineering process while solving open-ended problems? Does the student apply what is learned in one problem to the next problem encountered? The objective of this work is to document the problem-solving approach novice engineers take when presented with ambiguous, pen- ended design problems. This will be accomplished b a series of think-aloud studies that examine various aspects of engineering students' strategies for solving open-ended problems. These data will answer questions such as 1)do "good" students and "poor" students differ in their approach to studying case study material and solving open ended problems? 2)do approaches to engineering design problems of these two student groups differ from experienced engineers?, and 3)do engineering students generate self- explanations as they study case-study material about design problems, and does this help them improve their performance in design tasks? The answers to these questions will contribute to a research base from which recommendations will be developed for teaching strategies to facilitat e learning for engineering students. ***