Research Initiation: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer within Engineering Curricula

研究启动：促进工程课程内的知识转移

• 批准号: 2301341
• 负责人: Alexander De Rosa
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: University of Delaware
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-10-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2301341&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Research; Initiation; Facilitating; Knowledge; Transfer

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.

工科学生通常很难将一门课程中的观点应用到另一门课程中，也很难以新的方式运用所学知识。学生们不会像老师那样看到班级之间的联系。当这些学生进入工作场所，需要以新的方式运用他们的知识和学习时，这个困难就变成了一个问题。我们需要更好地理解为什么学生面临这些问题，并找到方法帮助学生将他们的学习转移到新的环境中。在这项研究中，我们将首先试图理解为什么学生在应用他们的知识方面存在问题。然后，我们将开发新的教学方法，帮助学生更好地转移所学知识。这些新的教学方法将经过测试，以显示其有效性，然后再用于帮助教育未来的学生。这项工作将增加我们对如何更好地为工科学生在他们的职业生涯中应用他们的知识做好准备的理解。虽然在本科课程中，学生很难在不同课程之间转换理论和技能，这是公认的事实，但许多大学水平的课程只关注与课程本身相关的材料，而不涉及这些材料如何在其他地方使用。因此，作为顶点设计课程的一部分，或者在他们的职业生涯中，学生们努力将来自多个领域的知识转移和整合到新的问题中，这并不奇怪。提出的调查建立在知识转移领域的工作基础上，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。认知科学和学科科学的许多作者都讨论了这些困难，并指出需要开发促进知识转移的工具和技术，以及帮助学生建立跨课程联系。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，至关重要地发展促进知识转移所需的活动和实践：(1)当学生被要求从先前的课程，特别是数学和物理中转移理论和技能时，他们遇到的主要挑战是什么？(2)激活先验知识的哪些方法最有效地使学生将这些先验知识应用于新的研究领域？在这项调查中，学生的先验知识和动机将通过概念图、概念量表和动机调查来评估。为支持和实现知识转移而开展的各种课堂活动随后将进行试点和评估。这些活动的有效性将通过检查学生转移解决这些特别设计的问题所需知识的能力和使用调查来评估。总体而言，本研究将有助于提高我们对知识转移障碍的理解，并开发有希望的促进知识转移的实践。本研究中开发的活动、教学实践和技术将解决文献中确定的这些工具的需求。然后，这些有前途的实践可以用来更好地为教学方法提供信息，帮助培养能够更好地将其知识应用于广泛应用的工程师。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。