Designing the Human Experience: Folio Thinking in Theory and Practice within a Freshman Engineering Seminar

工程教育在征聘和留住妇女和少数族裔方面长期存在缺陷。造成这一多方面问题的一个因素是学生对与工程实践有关的能力和知识缺乏信心。我们的变革理论预测，必须整合三个经验要素来建立信心;学生必须：1）在工程活动中体验自己的思维; 2）创造并看到他们已经制定和解决有趣的工程问题的切实证据;和3）被引导以最大化要素1和要素2的益处。为了解决这些问题，我们为新生提供学习经验，使他们在掌握基础知识之前就能做出明智的选择，选择工程学。我们正在通过开发和评估一种新的教学策略-对开式思维-在斯坦福大学的新生工程研讨会，设计人类体验：设计思维理论与实践。Folio Thinking是一种创新的教学范式，旨在通过指导学生创建学习组合的过程，提高他们对工程能力，知识和技能的认识，从而提高未来工程专业学生的智力自信。创建投资组合本身就是一个重要的学习经验和我们的主要评估工具。 我们正在与来自其他机构的工程系教师合作，开发一个用于评估学生作品集的标准。该项目将提供：详细的在线案例研究;一个开放供教育工作者和工程学院学习的数据库;以及一个可在国内和国际上重新使用、重新设计和重新部署的对开式思维教学法模型（作业、支持工具和材料）。我们希望学生会寻找这些课程，教师会发现上述材料在广泛的入门和高级工程课程中很有用，这些课程吸引并保持了多样化的工程学生群体。

Engineering education faces persistent shortcomings in the recruitment and retention of women and minorities. One factor contributing to this multifaceted problem is a lack of student confidence in abilities and knowledge related to engineering practice. Our theory-of-change predicts that three experiential elements must be integrated to build confidence; students must:1) experience their own thinking in engineering activities; 2) create and see tangible evidence that they have formulated and solved interesting engineering problems; and 3) be guided to maximize the benefits of elements 1 and 2.To address these issues, we are providing freshmen with a learning experience that will allow them to make informed choices in favor of engineering before they have acquired the fundamentals. We are accomplishing this by developing and evaluating a new instructional strategy-Folio Thinking-in a freshman engineering seminar at Stanford University, Designing the Human Experience: Design Thinking Theory and Practice. Folio Thinking is an innovative pedagogical paradigm aimed at increasing the intellectual self-confidence of prospective engineering majors by raising their awareness of their engineering aptitudes, knowledge, and skills by guiding students through the process of creating learning portfolios. Creating the portfolio is itself an important learning experience and our primary assessment instrument. We are collaborating with engineering faculty members from other institutions to develop a rubric for evaluating the student portfolios. This project will deliver: a detailed online case-study; a corpus of data open to study by educators and engineering faculty; and a model of Folio Thinking pedagogy (assignments, supporting tools, and materials) for re-use, re-design, and re-deployment nationally and internationally. We expect that students will seek out these courses and that faculty will find the above materials useful in a wide array of introductory and advanced engineering courses that attract and maintain a diverse engineering student body.