This study conducts follow up research to my Mechanical Engineering Senior Project that was completed in March 2015. It follows the Student Powered Hydro and Entertainment Device (SPHED) as it is used in various middle school and high school classrooms. SPHED has three modules: a power generation module, a hydropower...
The work of engineering education researchers has resulted in the development of research-based instructional strategies (RBISs) aimed at providing educators with means to increase student learning. Research has shown that there is a disconnect between the development of RBISs and their use by educators. Means to make new practices more...
Student engagement in a course plays a vital role in a student’s ability to process and construct knowledge. Student engagement research has investigated how students engage in and out of the classroom on a macro scale, through observation and survey data collection of large student populations, which lack focus on...
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...
Background: Studies indicate that problems utilized in traditional undergraduate engineering education do not adequately prepare students for the workforce. Calls to implement authentic, ill-structured problems into upper level engineering experiences may address this issue but adopting authentic engineering problems without considering barriers to adoption of faculty has not been fully...
Engineering education research has led to a greater understanding of the gap in preparedness of students for the engineering industry. Multiple studies comparing the workplace and academic contexts and the participants in those contexts (i.e., students, faculty, and engineering practitioners) have emphasized similarities and differences between the two contexts by...
Preparing successful engineering undergraduate students for the workforce is imperative and requires students to apply their conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals to engineering design work. Conceptual understanding is assessed through the use of concept inventories. Learning theories may help explain differences in concept inventory performance. Expert novice theory suggests that...
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...
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...
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...