The Role of Service-Learning: Improving Engineering Education
Collaborators
William Oakes (Purdue University)
Russel Faux (Davis Square Research Associates)
Funding Source
This research is funded under the National Science Foundation's IEECI Program, under Grant No. EEC-0835981. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Goals and Overview The overall purpose of this research project is to measure the effectiveness of engineering service experiences as pedagogical methods for teaching engineering and to examine how these experiences attract a more diverse set of engineering students than is currently represented in the population of engineering students. This project will conduct an investigation of how participation in engineering service relates to the dynamic interplay between students' engineering design self-efficacy, engineering epistemological beliefs, and understanding of fundamental engineering concepts. Our analysis will be used to quantify the role that such programs - specifically the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program (STOMP), Engineers Without Borders (EWB-USA), and Engineering Projects in Community Service-Learning (EPICS) - have in attracting and retaining students to engineering. Furthermore, because these engineering service experiences tend to have a disproportionately high percentage of women participants in relation to the overall percentage of women in engineering programs, this project will also use these three constructs to explain why these programs are particularly attractive to women in engineering. Research Questions
Methods
To investigate the research questions, engineering undergraduate students participating in STOMP, EWB, and EPICS will be compared to engineering students going through traditional classroom learning and undergraduate research opportunities. Each participant will be given a set of surveys and and a design task to analyze their self-efficacy toward engineering design, their engineering epistemological beliefs, and their conceptual understanding of the engineering design process. The first two assessments will be conducted using online surveys that have already been validated. The latter instrument will be administered as a hands-on design task.
Preliminary Results Pilot studies of the design task using verbal protocol analysis have just been completed. The results of these studies can be viewed in our REES Conference publications, Design Studies publication, and ASEE conference proceedings. The results of these studies have been used to develop a digital workbook (using Robobooks) designed to collect quantitative data. The purely quantitative study is currently underway and will hopefully have presentable results by the Summer of 2010.
Lemons, G., Carberry, A., Swan, C., Rogers, C., & Jarvin, L. (2010). The importance of problem interpretation for engineering students. Paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, KY. PDF Lemons, G., Carberry, A., Swan, C., Jarvin, L., & Rogers C. (2010). The benefits of model building in teaching engineering design. Design Studies, 31, 288-309. PDF Carberry, A., Lemons, G., Swan, C., Jarvin, L., & Rogers, C. (2009). Investigating engineering design through model-building. Paper presented at the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Queensland, Australia. PDF Lemons, G., Carberry, A., Swan, C., Jarvin, L., & Rogers, C. (2009). Using a hands on design task to compare the design process of service learning and non-service learning engineering students. Paper presented at the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Queensland, Australia. PDF
Press Releases Does Service Learning Produce better Engineers and attract women to the field? (June 3, 2009) - Tufts Press Release Do Helping Helping Hands Make for Better Engineers? (April 1,
2009) - Tufts
Journal NSF Supports Professor Chris Swan to Study the Role of Service Learning in Improving Engineering Education (September, 2008) - Tisch College Newsletter Associated Web Links STOMP Network
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