One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to linking theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.
As a student, I always enjoyed seeing the relationships between seemingly unrelated topics in the engineering curriculum. I also enjoyed discovering these relationships in the field as a practicing engineer; the relationships between different engineering and non-engineering disciplines. And now as teaching assistant for the freshman engineering class at Purdue, I would like to transfer this important skill to my students.
I am a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a freshmen course in engineering at Purdue. Even though I am considered as a millennial, I feel that my students learn and interact, or prefer to interact while learning, somehow differently from me. But I still feel comfortable with all the situations I have encountered thus far with them. In fact, the framework described in A Generational Approach to Understanding Students by Coomes and DeBard emphasizes that “the variance within groups is always greater than the variance between groups.” I fully agree with this statement in that we might have different perspectives on teaching and learning, or on different ethnic and cultural issues, but we, the students and myself, are still more flexible and willing to adapt to our differences between ourselves than to adapt to the differences with an older generation. This can be partly because we share the same experience of expressing ourselves as being different from the older generations, and because we, as a generation, have to interact with the same larger “cultural force” that is more different from us.
In my two posts on this topic, I will discuss my growth and teaching experience along two of the four How People Learn (HPL) dimensions: the Assessment-Centered, and Community-Centered dimensions. The other two dimensions that are not discussed are the Knowledge-Centered and the Learner-Centered dimensions. I also asked the students to provide feedback for me on my performance as experienced by them in each one of the four dimensions. The feedback is not included in the posts; some of my reflections on it are included though.
Assessment-Centeredness
I had a math professor who used to say, “Let’s make a reality check!” By this he means that he wants to assess our understanding to the concepts that he has just explained in the classroom and during the lecture. He is an old but intelligent professor. To bridge the gap between us and him, he usually gave examples of so many applications that we use in our daily life that utilize the concepts he explains. For example, he gave examples on how the Fourier Transform and the Fast Fourier Transform are everywhere in our digital age, and how these abstract mathematical concepts found their way to applications in fascinating devices like the iPods and the like.
In the beginning, as a student and as an instructor, I always undervalued grades as a way to assess understanding. Also, in the beginning of the semester, I hated when students asked about grades as I wanted them to focus on understanding the materials. In addition to that, the structure of the course I taught did not allow adding more burdens on either the students or the instructors for more grading. I believe that there are many ways to assess understanding.
For example, I once had a professor who assesses understanding in a very interesting and effective way. Contrary to the conventional approach, he showed up in the beginning of the semester and wrote in large letters on the board “No questions!” And between “No” and “questions” in the previous sentence there was the word “dumb”- No dumb questions! That is a call for challenge. Engineers like to be challenged. This is why they are in this profession. They do not like to be in a math class where the professor quizzes them to assess their understanding, or in large classroom where they communicate their Yes-No responses to a question for the sake of assessing their understanding. They like to talk about what they do because they like doing it. This is why instructors should give them the chance to talk, and this is why instructors should challenge them to talk. They should talk beyond the Yes-No response if an instructor wants to assess their understanding of a design concept or idea. Of course, there are no such things as dumb questions.
Also, a crucial part of achieving my personal philosophy of developing a systems perspective of engineering with the students is the use of challenging take-home, open world exams. My observation from grading exams is that students who get an A in an exam are not necessarily the best. That is, they were able to absorb the assigned material very well, and achieved the learning objectives of that exam, but they were not exceedingly excellent in going beyond the expectations, which is the unique characteristic of an A-student. (The nature of these exams, however, is understandable for a huge class like this!) Take-home, open world exams simulate the real world, and require the students to think holistically, given the relaxed exam conditions, and thus achieving the purpose of developing the systems perspective.
In addition to take-home exams, reality check of key concepts should be made. From my personal experience I found that pop quizzes that ask about key concepts are the best in assessing students’ understanding of key concepts. Quizzes should be application-oriented to see if students can really apply an abstract concept to a given situation in an application, which is similar to what an engineer would face in reality. I would consider this fitting well with assessment-centered lens in the HPL framework.
Another experience I had that is related to this dimension was during grading. Grading and giving feedback might be time consuming but it is really important. It was difficult for me to just give the student that her or his answer was wrong, and I felt all the time that it was important to provide feedback on the graded material. This feedback may involve clarifying or explaining the mistake or the fact. I think that despite the fact that this was a time consuming process, my hope in the beginning of the semester was that the students will benefit from that. And they did. Most of them did. In the past, I noticed improvements in the performance of individual students by considering the comments that are in the form of the feedback.
Because I still do not value numerical grades too much, I structured my questions in the HPL evaluation feedback I asked the students to complete for me around feedback that I have provided to them on graded homeworks and exams. That said, however, my understanding of this assessment-centeredness dimension made me believe in the importance of returning graded homeworks quickly to the students, as they seem to need this.
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