Learning an Integrated View of Engineering (LIVE)

工程-电气（55）本项目通过在现有课程中引入主要基于概念图的新模块来加强课程整合。这些模块明确地在整个项目中不同课程中教授的概念或方法之间建立联系。研究者的目的是提高学生对基本概念之间相互联系的理解，提高他们使用这些概念解决新问题的能力，使他们更容易学习新范式以应对新技术，并最大限度地减少对跨学科问题的厌恶。他们正在为四门课程（工程导论、信号与系统、电磁系统和顶点设计）创造新的学习材料和教学策略，这些课程利用概念图来显示课程之间的联系。研究者假设，在知识建构过程中，跨课程知识的教学将显著提高学生对新问题，特别是复杂问题或跨学科问题的同化、记忆、回忆和应用知识的能力。他们通过在一个网站上张贴他们与国家工程教育资料库相连的文章，在工程教育会议和期刊上发表演讲和出版物，以及在欧洲经委会具体部门和在欧洲经委会部门首长会议上进行谈话，来传播他们的方法和数据。评估工作是利用学生在特殊评估测试中的表现和关于学生看法的开放式反馈来确定项目中的学生是否与对照组不同，以及GPA是否影响这些差异。更广泛的影响包括传播材料，特别是通过国家可持续发展实验室和欧洲经委会各部门主管。以及对工程教育产生广泛影响的潜力。

Engineering - Electrical (55)This project is enhancing curricular integration by introducing new modules based principally on concept maps into existing courses. These modules explicitly establish connections among the concepts or methods taught in different courses throughout the program. The Investigators intend to improve students' understanding of the interconnections among basic concepts, to increase their ability to use such concepts to solve new problems, to enable them to more easily learn new paradigms to cope with new technologies, and to minimize the aversion to interdisciplinary problems. They are creating new learning materials and teaching strategies for four courses (Introduction to Engineering, Signals and Systems, Electromagnetic Systems, and Capstone Design) that utilize concept maps showing the connections between the courses. The investigators hypothesize that the teaching of cross-course knowledge during the process of knowledge building will significantly enhance the students' assimilation, retention, recall, and application of knowledge to the solution of new problems, particularly complex or interdisciplinary problems. They are disseminating their methods and data by postings on a website, which they are connecting to the NSDL, by presentation and publications in the engineering education conferences and journals, and by talks to specific ECE departments and at the ECE Department Heads meeting. The evaluation effort is using student performance on special assessment tests and open-ended feedback about student perceptions to determine if students in the program differ from a control group and if GPA affects these differences. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the material, particularly through the NSDL and the ECE Department Heads. and the potential for a wide-reaching effect on engineering education.