Collaborative Research: Design and Development: The Skillful Learning Institute

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The Skillful Learning Institute is a virtual short course experience for 25-30 engineering educators to expand the explicit engagement of engineering students in their metacognitive development. Such intentional engagement with students, helping them become more skillful learners, is critically lacking at present. Metacognition is instrumental in being able to independently assess and direct one's learning - a lifelong skill to propel ongoing growth and development. As such, metacognition is important for engineers because it empowers them (i.e., builds their agency and self-efficacy) to handle ambiguity inherent in navigating and solving engineering problems. The ultimate goal is to enhance the education of engineers through explicit metacognitive training, and the focus is on educators for their enduring and multiplicative impact on current and future engineering students, and, secondary impacts on their colleagues. The experience is designed to build educators' capacities to teach metacognition and to continue to use and develop engaging metacognitive activities. Intentional elements are included to build a sense of community and mutual support where participants are actively engaged with each other and the facilitators. The aim is to enhance the translation of the resulting metacognitive activities into practice and to develop a lasting community of support after the completion of the short course. This project will create a diverse virtual community of scholars organized around the desire to see metacognition explicitly integrated into existing curriculum. By eliminating the time and cost of travel, this project will enable populations that might otherwise be limited in attendance such as professional-track faculty, teaching focused faculty, community college faculty, adjunct faculty. In turn, the diverse participants will reach a diverse mix of engineering students with metacognitive training - supporting all students' success. The short course consists of three two-hour synchronous virtual workshops over a six-week period in the summer. These three virtual workshops will use a flipped classroom pedagogy. During the virtual short course educators will be mentored through the design and implementation of one unique metacognitive activity for their context using a backwards design process. At the end of the short course, participants will have an intervention they can use immediately with their students and the skills to continue to design, develop, and adapt additional interventions they believe will be successful in their contexts. This level of personal ownership, emergent from a supportive and scaffolded environment, greatly increases the likelihood of success. The variety of different metacognitive interventions resulting from the project and that have been tried and tested will be captured in a repository for sharing with the engineering education community. Evaluation data will illuminate the effective elements of virtual, synchronous meetings in facilitating a community of scholars organized around metacognition and aid transferability of workshop features.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.