Enhancing Engineering Students’ Ability to Think Deeply about their Learning Through Formal and Continuous Reflection

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving engineering students' ability to reflect deeply on their learning. An ability to reflect is a necessary workforce skill. It helps one to learn on their own at work. It is needed for U.S. innovation and economic competitiveness. This project is significant because it focuses on investigating the use of reflection activities across entire engineering degree programs. Engineering teachers will be trained to create and use reflection activities in their classrooms. Practical teacher resources to build reflective capacity will be created. One target outcome is students with a well-developed ability to use reflection to guide their learning as they do engineering work. A second outcome sought is a change in engineering teaching practices.The goal of the project is to investigate how purposefully embedded student reflection, supported by a consistent framework, across a degree program, impacts students’ metacognitive strategies as an indicator of preparation for workplace learning. This project is significant because of its focus on the impact of formal and continuous reflection on students’ development of metacognitive strategies over time through theory-based analysis of students’ reflections rather than relying solely on quantitative measures of students’ perceptions. The overall research questions are: What is the impact of the theory-driven integration of reflection across engineering curricula on students’ metacognitive regulatory abilities? How does the integration of reflection activities impact instructional team members’ beliefs about reflection in engineering education and teaching and learning beliefs? The research questions will be addressed through four project aims: (1) co-design reflection integration strategies appropriate for different course types, academic levels, and desired learning outcomes, (2) illuminate the longitudinal development of metacognitive strategies that students use across an engineering curriculum, (3) explore instructional team experiences with reflection integration, and (4) co-develop practical resources for engineering course- and program-level integration of reflection. These aims will be accomplished through quantitative and qualitative data collection methods including student reflections and surveys as well as instructional team interviews. Dissemination of the project results is intended to lay groundwork for institutional improvement in STEM education. Project dissemination includes research venues (e.g., conferences, archival journals) and research-to-practice venues (e.g., engineering discipline conferences). The NSF IUSE:EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.