Research Initiation: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer within Engineering Curricula

工科学生经常难以将思想从一门课程应用到另一门课程，并以新的方式使用他们所学的知识。学生们看不到老师所看到的班级之间的联系。当这些学生进入职场，需要以新的方式将他们的知识和学习用于他们的职业生涯时，这个困难就成了一个问题。我们需要更好地了解学生面临这些问题的原因，并找到方法帮助学生将学习转移到新的环境中。在这项研究中，我们将首先试图了解为什么学生在应用他们的知识时会有困难。然后，我们将开发新的教学方法，帮助学生更好地转移学习。这些新的教学方法将经过测试，以展示其有效性，然后再用于帮助未来的学生。这项工作将增加我们对如何更好地为工科学生在职业生涯中应用他们的知识做好准备的理解。尽管众所周知，学生在本科课程中很难在不同课程之间转移理论和技能，但许多大学课程只关注与课程本身有关的材料，而不包括如何将这些材料用于其他地方。因此，作为顶石设计课程的一部分，或者在他们的职业生涯中，学生们很难将来自多个领域的知识转移和整合到新的问题中，这就不足为奇了。拟议的调查建立在知识转让领域工作的基础上，该领域注意到学生在新的和不熟悉的情况下应用他们的理解时经常面临的问题。认知科学和学科领域的许多作者都讨论了这些困难，并指出有必要开发促进知识转移的工具和技术，并帮助学生建立跨学科的联系。这项工作将解决知识转移的障碍，并通过回答以下研究问题，关键地发展促进知识转移所需的活动和实践：(1)学生在传授先前课程的理论和技能时遇到的主要挑战是什么？(2)在使学生能够将先前的知识应用于新的学习领域方面，哪些先前知识激活的方法最有效？在这项调查中，将使用概念图、概念清单和动机调查来评估学生的先前知识和动机。随后将试行和评估为支持和促进知识传授而开展的各种课堂活动。这些活动的有效性将通过检查学生传授解决这些特别设计的问题所需的知识的能力和使用调查来评估。总体而言，这项研究将有助于提高我们对知识转移障碍的理解，以及制定促进知识转移的有前途的做法。这项研究中开发的活动、教学实践和技术将满足文献中确定的这些工具的需求。这些有前景的实践可以用来更好地为教学方法提供信息，帮助形成更有能力将他们的知识转移到广泛应用程序中的工程师。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Engineering students often have difficulty applying ideas from one course to another and using their learning in new ways. The students do not see the same links between their classes that their teachers see. This difficulty becomes a problem when these students go into the workplace and need to use their knowledge and learning in new ways for their career. We need to better understand why students face these problems and to find ways to help students transfer their learning to new settings. In this research, we will first seek to understand why students have problems applying their knowledge. We will then develop new ways to teach students that help them better transfer their learning. These new ways of teaching will be tested in order to show their effectiveness before being used to help teach future students. This work will increase our understanding of how to better prepare engineering students to apply their knowledge in their career.Although it is well-established that students have difficulty transferring theory and skills between courses in their undergraduate curriculum, many college-level courses only concern material relating to the course itself and do not cover how this material might be used elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that students struggle to transfer and integrate knowledge from multiple areas into new problems as part of capstone design courses, for example, or in their careers. The proposed investigation builds on work in the field of knowledge transfer which has noted the problems students often face in applying their understanding in new and unfamiliar situations. Various authors in both cognitive and disciplinary sciences have discussed these difficulties and noted the need to develop tools and techniques for promoting knowledge transfer, as well as to help students develop cross-course connections. This work will address the barriers to knowledge transfer, and crucially develop the needed activities and practices for promoting transfer by answering the following research questions: (1) What are the primary challenges experienced by students when tasked with transferring theory and skills from prior courses, specifically mathematics and physics? (2) What methods of prior knowledge activation are most effective in enabling students to apply this prior knowledge in new areas of study? In this investigation, the prior knowledge and motivation of students will be assessed using concept maps, concept inventories, and motivational surveys. Various in-class activities developed to support and enable knowledge transfer will then be piloted and assessed. The effectiveness of these activities will be assessed by examining student ability to transfer the knowledge required to solve these specially designed problems and by using surveys. Overall, this study will help to improve our understanding of the barriers to knowledge transfer, as well as developing promising practices that promote transfer. The activities, teaching practices, and techniques developed in this study will address the need for these tools identified in the literature. These promising practices can then be used to better inform teaching methods that aid the formation of engineers who are better equipped to transfer their knowledge across a broad range of applications.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.