Collaborative Research: Design and Development: The Skillful Learning Institute

Skillful Learning Institute是为25-30名工程教育工作者提供的虚拟短期课程体验，旨在扩大工程专业学生在元认知开发中的明确参与。这种有意识地与学生接触，帮助他们成为更熟练的学习者，目前严重缺乏。元认知有助于独立评估和指导一个人的学习-一项终身技能，以推动持续的成长和发展。因此，元认知对工程师很重要，因为它赋予他们权力（即，建立他们的代理和自我效能）来处理导航和解决工程问题中固有的模糊性。最终目标是通过明确的元认知培训来加强工程师的教育，重点是教育工作者对当前和未来工程专业学生的持久和倍增影响，以及对同事的次要影响。该体验旨在培养教育者教授元认知的能力，并继续使用和开发引人入胜的元认知活动。有意的元素包括建立一个社区和相互支持的感觉，参与者积极参与彼此和主持人。目的是加强将由此产生的元概念活动转化为实践，并在短期课程结束后发展一个持久的支持社区。 该项目将创建一个多元化的虚拟学者社区，围绕着希望看到元认知明确融入现有课程的愿望组织起来。通过消除旅行的时间和成本，该项目将使人口，否则可能是有限的出席，如专业轨道教师，教学重点教师，社区学院教师，兼职教师。反过来，不同的参与者将接触到不同的工程专业学生，并进行元认知培训-支持所有学生的成功。短期课程包括三个两小时的同步虚拟研讨会在夏季为期六周。这三个虚拟研讨会将使用翻转课堂教学法。在虚拟短期课程中，教育工作者将通过使用向后设计过程设计和实施一个独特的元认知活动来指导他们的环境。在短期课程结束时，参与者将有一个干预措施，他们可以立即使用与他们的学生和技能，继续设计，开发和调整他们认为将在他们的情况下成功的其他干预措施。这种程度的个人所有权，从一个支持和脚手架的环境中涌现出来，大大增加了成功的可能性。从该项目中产生的各种不同的元认知干预措施，并已尝试和测试，将被捕获在一个存储库与工程教育界分享。评估数据将阐明虚拟同步会议的有效要素，以促进围绕元认知组织的学者社区，并帮助研讨会功能的可转移性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.