Reflection in engineering education: Advancing conversations

反思，作为一种思维形式，涉及走出情境并创造知识。在教育背景下，反思在专业实践、从经验中学习以及成功实施主动学习等教学方法中起着至关重要的作用。在支持学生学习的过程中，教育者可以通过反思活动潜在地改善和改变学生的学习。就所需的时间而言，反思活动可以是适度的，因此可以添加到现有的教学努力中，以帮助扩大许多类型的教育活动的影响，并帮助个人超越简单地做得更好。反思活动可能是一个重要的工具，在努力提高工程教育，解决问题，如多样性和保留，并支持学习目标，如创新和全球竞争力。然而，在工程教育中，反思和反思活动尚未得到充分研究。拟议的工作将建立和完善工具，以帮助教育工作者和学者更好地了解学生参与反思活动，特别是他们参与反思活动的反应和他们自我报告的知识收获。这些工具对于帮助工程教育工作者通过明智的选择将反思活动引入他们的教学中至关重要，并为反思活动更深入、更细致的学术研究创造机会。本研究的目的是用一种常见的方法来探讨工科本科生的知识收获，以便更容易地比较反思活动。另一个目的是更好地了解学生对反思活动的反应，以一种可能服务于许多目的的方式，如解释学习结果和确定改进活动的方法。对工科本科学生进行为期数周的研究，最终以面试结束，这将捕捉到学生在谈论反思时的观点。这些观点将用于完善与参与反思活动的知识和反应相关的概念模型。调查项目的可用性研究和主要成分分析也将用于系统地发展和验证调查工具。最后，一项针对选定的反射活动（例如考试包装）的研究将用于进一步的调查验证。拟议的工作以系统、严格的过程为特色，在调查工具开发中使用最佳实践，并通过反思活动支持教育工作者实现学习目标。为了后者的目的，我们建议的工作包括学术和实践传播。

Reflection, as a form of thinking, involves stepping out of a situation and creating knowledge. In an educational context, reflection plays a critical role in professional practice, learning from experience, and successful implementation of teaching methods such as active learning. In supporting student learning, educators can potentially improve and transform student learning through reflection activities. Reflection activities can be modest in terms of the amount of time required and thus can be added to existing instructional efforts to help magnify the impact of many types of educational activities and help individuals go beyond simply doing better. Reflection activities may be a significant tool in efforts to critically improve engineering education, address issues such as diversity and retention, and support learning goals such as innovation and global competencies. Yet, within engineering education, reflection and reflection activities are understudied. The proposed work will establish and refine instruments that will help educators and scholars better understand student engagement in reflection activities, specifically their reactions to engaging in reflection activities and their self-reported knowledge gains. These instruments will be critical for helping engineering educators bring reflection activities into their teaching through informed choices and creating opportunities for deeper and more nuanced scholarship on reflection activities. The intent of this study is to explore undergraduate engineering students' knowledge gains using a common approach so that reflection activities can be compared more readily. Another intent is to better understand student reactions to the reflection activities in a way that may serve many purposes such as interpreting study results and identifying ways to refine activities. A multi-week study with undergraduate engineering students culminating in interviews will capture students' perspectives when talking about reflection. These perspectives will be used to refine the conceptual models related to knowledge from and reactions to engaging in reflection activities. Usability studies of survey items and a principal component analysis will also be used to systematically develop and validate survey instruments. Finally, a study focusing on a selected reflection activity (e.g. exam wrappers) will be used for further survey validation. The proposed work features a systematic, rigorous process using best practices in survey instrument development, and in supporting educators in operationalizing learning goals through reflection activities. To this latter end, our proposed work includes both scholarly and practical dissemination.