Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Complementary affordances of virtual and physical laboratories for developing engineering epistemic practices

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In addition to being able to competently perform engineering calculations, professional engineers must be prepared to work effectively in teams, consider problems in context, make evidence-based decisions, and persist and learn from failure. Laboratory work provides an important tool for professional formation, allowing university engineering students to develop these skills. Successful laboratory task designs should provide rich opportunities to develop these skills but also must fit into the constraints of the educational setting. This study will investigate the ways that a virtual (simulation-based) and physical (hands-on) laboratory based on the same realistic engineering process prepares students for the profession. In particular, we will investigate if the virtual and physical laboratory modes develop different but complementary skills. The knowledge gained will better position engineering educators to design and employ virtual and physical laboratories, including cases where students are place-bound and may not have access to physical equipment. While this study will focus on a process specific to environmental engineering, the knowledge gained has the potential to broadly impact teaching and learning practices across all engineering and science disciplines that rely on laboratory investigation in the curriculum. The knowledge gained will also contribute to increased access to STEM disciplines by supporting on-line courses and degree programs. Finally, we will develop increased capacity in engineering education research through the intentional mentoring of one university faculty member and the training and development of two graduate students. Through a microgenetic analysis of the activity of four student teams engaging in both the virtual and physical versions of the same laboratory, we will develop transferrable knowledge of how laboratory mode and instructional design influence students’ participation in epistemic practices. Epistemic practices are the socially organized and interactionally accomplished ways that members of a group propose, communicate, justify, assess, and legitimize knowledge claims. Specifically, in this PFE:RIEF project, research and mentoring activity will be organized around the investigation of a laboratory in the environmental engineering discipline – the Jar Test Laboratory for Water Treatment. Jar testing is a laboratory procedure commonly used by design engineers and drinking water treatment plant operators to optimize physical and chemical conditions for the effective coagulation, flocculation and settling of particulate contaminants from water. The central hypothesis of this work is that physical laboratories foreground social and material epistemic practices while virtual laboratories foreground social and conceptual epistemic practices. We will employ three primary data sources: (1) video records and researcher observation of the teams as they complete the laboratory; (2) semi-structured stimulated recall interviews of the students and laboratory instructors; and, (3) student work products. We will use discourse analysis from the student recordings and coding of the stimulated recall interviews to answer the following research questions: (1) In what ways and to what extent does conducting an experiment in a physical mode to develop a process recommendation influence students’ engineering epistemic practices? (2) In what ways and to what extent does conducting an experiment in a virtual mode to develop a process recommendation influence students’ engineering epistemic practices? (3) How do students in each laboratory mode respond to being “stuck”? Do students’ views on the iterative nature of science/engineering and their tolerance for mistakes depend on the instructional design afforded by the laboratory mode?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.