Enhancing Intrinsic Motivation in Core Engineering Courses

本课题是对大学二年级的电气与计算机工程课程进行重新设计，以提高学生学习技术工程内容的内在动力。动机研究发现，当课程内容与他们的职业目标相关联时，当他们可以对自己的学习做出一些决定时，学生们学得更多。这个项目为学生提供了不同的项目选择，帮助他们学习必修课程的内容。研究人员正在收集有关学生学习数字逻辑和计算机组织中关键工程概念的动机的评估数据。在这门新课程中，学生的学习和动机也与传统工程课程中相同主题的对照组进行了比较。研究生助教和工程教员正在接受培训，以教授其他主题的基于动机的工程课程。

This project is redesigning a sophomore-level electrical and computer engineering course to increase students' intrinsic motivation for learning technical engineering content. Motivation research has found that students learn more when the content is linked to their career goals and when they can make some decisions about their own learning. This project is offering students different options for projects which will help them learn the required course content. The investigators are collecting evaluation data which relates students' motivation to their learning of key engineering concepts in digital logic and computer organization. Student learning and motivation in this new course are also being compared to a control group in a traditional engineering course on the same topic. Graduate teaching assistants and engineering faculty members are being trained to teach motivation-based engineering courses in other topics as well.