Background
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded multiple research projects dedicated to the development of research and evidence based instructional strategies in an effort to improve the state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the US. These efforts have led to an abundance of research based...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore civil engineering students’ and professional civil engineers' understanding of concepts within statics and fluid mechanics. The studies described herein begin to examine theories of situated cognition utilizing concept inventories, which are sets of multiple-choice questions where the incorrect answers are based on...
As people learn new concepts, they experience a process termed conceptual change. There are several theories that attempt to explain conceptual change, and this paper uses the framework theory to explain how students learn mechanics of materials. Semi-structured interviews with ninety students were qualitatively analyzed for this research in an...
It is expected that information taught in the context of school will ultimately transfer to workplace settings. To support this transition, educators and researchers advocate for organizing foundational ideas, or concepts, in specific domains of knowing. In the domain of transportation engineering, knowing of concepts, which include "big ideas" such...
Evaluation of teaching is used to examine and improve teaching quality in higher education. The literature consists of best teaching evaluation practices that have been developed, yet there is little research that has been conducted which investigates teaching evaluation practices in engineering programs. This thesis represents two manuscripts that explore...
Improving safety education could contribute to the preparation of better professional engineers. Safety topics are not holistically embedded in transportation course curricula. This thesis explores the current state in which safety is being incorporated in transportation course curricula in terms of design and compares the uses of safety data in...
Student engagement is key for learning in the classroom, and different levels of engagement have led to greater learning. The ICAP framework distinguishes these different levels of engagement by different overt behaviors, but little is known about how to measure different forms of engagement in the classroom. This article will...
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Shane A. Brown
Student engagement is key for learning in the classroom, and different levels
Traditional faculty development programs aimed at disseminating research-based pedagogy and innovations at potential adopters have helped increase awareness of these innovations; however, their adoption into engineering classrooms has been limited. This paper aims to present an alternative, pull-oriented approach to faculty development where faculty participants co-develop curricular innovations with engineering...
Situated cognition theory emphasizes the role that social and material contexts have on learning and knowledge application. Several studies of engineering workplace environments have noted differences between the social and material contexts of the workplace and those of undergraduate engineering education. No existing research has studied the social and material...
Engineering practitioners solve problems in various ways; it is plausible that they often rely on graphs, figures, formulas and other representations to reach a solution. How and why engineering practitioners use representations to solve problems can characterize certain problem-solving behaviors, which can be used to determine particular types of problem...