Competency: Assessment and Evaluation
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Engineering Problem Based Learning Environment Evaluation
Summary: I was a part of a team of three students that created a problem based learning environment for an engineering course. This was a semester long project for ISLT 9478 - Designing Problem Based Learning. The professor planned to implement the unit in place of 3 weeks of his course lab. We decided to do a study on the implementation. The result was a lessons learned document that was presented as a paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) conference.
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Process: Two other students and I set out to see whether completing an open ended, problem solving unit would change student's ability to solve other open ended engineering problems. That project yielded no correlations other than students performing better on tests and overall in the class based on their GPA and year in school. At the suggestion of Dr. Rose Marra, another student and I did follow up interviews with the professor, the TAs and students to determine lessons that could be learned from implementing a PBL Environment.
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My Role: My partner and I worked together to create an open ended interview protocol. I conducted interviews of the engineering professor, two teaching assistants, and three students. I also transcribed half of the interviews. I looked for emergent themes in the interviews which were combined with my partner's emergent themes. For the conference paper, I wrote the introduction and methodology. I also helped edit the paper throughout and submitted it to the conference.
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Reflection: The feedback from all parties was very valuable and helped me make some changes to the PBLE website before it was implemented the second time. One of the most informative things we learned was that the material that the professor helped us develop for the PBLE had no connection to anything the students did in the classroom. Also, the TAs found several mathematical errors in the calculations the professor provided. We also learned that often a single student worked the computer and if four or more were in a group, students were often disengaged. The evaluation was strong enough to be published in ASEE conference proceedings.
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Artifact: 2014 ASEE Conference Paper: PBL Field Deployment: Lessons Learned in Adding a Problem Based Learning Unit to a Traditional Engineering Lecture and Lab Course
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