Intervention to Improve Engagement and Mediate Conclusion Fear in Engineering Education

提高工程教育参与度并调解结论恐惧的干预措施

• 批准号: 1340480
• 负责人: Peter Ludovice
• 金额: $ 14.98万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1340480&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Intervention; Improve; Engagement; Mediate; Conclusion

The PIs propose an unorthodox and transformational approach to improving engineering education.It requires embracing a concept that has been used with great success by other organizations from marketing firms to educational television: humor. Despite the light nature of the subject, the team will conduct a large-scale controlled study to quantitatively determine if humor is statistically effective in improving engineering education. Specifically, they will test if the general intervention of humor can improve general engineering educational outcomes and retention. The hypothesis is that such an improvement would be due to an increase in the immediacy of the instructor interaction and they will test the likelihood that this mechanism is behind any observed improvement. They will also test if the use of humorous or whimsical systems with no less technical rigor (i.e. swelling gummi bears vs. heat exchangers) will reduce students? inability to make conclusions from engineering analysis (Conclusion Fear). Based on Cognitive-Affective personality theory, the team believes students? fear making conclusions given the internal impression that faculty are domain-experts that will severely criticize their conclusions. By using humorous systems for data or model analysis they will dispel this impression and empower students to make the important conclusions they need to make engineering design decisions thereby improving educational outcomes. The proposed work uses a unique team of an educational researcher experienced in engineering education and an engineering professor who is also a professionalcomedian.Intellectual Merit :This will be the first large-scale controlled experiment to determine the effectiveness ofhumor on technical education, amid a sea of action-research investigations that have littleor no statistically significant results. This study will also provide insight into the mechanismbehind the effectiveness of a humorous intervention based on current personality theories.Such insight will allow more general application of humor to improve engineering education.Broader Impacts :The results of this study will have significant impact on (i) distance learning (the immediacyconcept addressed by our humorous intervention is even more important in this learning mode),and (ii) attrition rates among engineering students. Given that the unorthodox nature of ourapproach will appeal to a demographic that does not usually consider engineering studies,it has the potential to create a significant trend in engineering outreach and recruitingto address the U.S. need for significant numbers of engineers in the near future.

PI提出了一种非正统的、变革性的方法来改善工程教育，它需要接受一个概念，这个概念已经被其他组织（从营销公司到教育电视）成功地使用过：幽默。尽管这一主题性质轻松，但该团队将进行一项大规模的对照研究，以定量确定幽默在改善工程教育方面是否具有统计学效果。具体来说，他们将测试幽默的一般干预是否可以改善一般工程教育成果和保留。假设这种改善是由于教师互动的直接性增加，他们将测试这种机制支持任何观察到的改善的可能性。他们还将测试是否使用幽默或异想天开的系统与不那么严格的技术（即膨胀橡皮糖熊与热交换器）将减少学生？无法从工程分析中得出结论（结论恐惧）。基于认知情感人格理论，研究小组认为学生？害怕下结论，因为内部的印象是教师是领域专家，会严厉批评他们的结论。通过使用幽默系统进行数据或模型分析，他们将消除这种印象，并使学生能够做出他们需要做出工程设计决策的重要结论，从而提高教育成果。这项工作由一个在工程教育方面经验丰富的教育研究人员和一个同时也是专业喜剧演员的工程学教授组成的独特团队。智力优势：这将是第一个大规模的控制实验，以确定幽默对技术教育的有效性，在大量的行动研究调查中，几乎没有或根本没有统计学意义的结果。这项研究还将提供洞察机制背后的幽默干预的有效性，根据目前的人格理论。这种洞察力将允许更普遍的应用幽默，以改善工程education.Broader影响：这项研究的结果将有显着的影响（一）远程学习（immediacyconcept解决我们的幽默干预是更重要的，在这种学习模式），（ii）工程专业学生的流失率。鉴于我们的非正统性质将吸引通常不考虑工程研究的人口，它有可能在工程推广和招聘方面创造一个重要的趋势，以满足美国在不久的将来对大量工程师的需求。