My journey of writing the essay “what is engineering education”

When I started to write the essay of “what is engineering education”, I had a hard time to integrate the former two essays into this one, because I thought engineering education was not simply the combination of engineering and education. I learnt a lot about the history and contemporary development of engineering education in the last four week’s readings, which greatly improved my understanding of the discipline. However, the readings addressed so many curriculum design and pedagogical strategies that I found it hard to pick up some “crucial points” and therefore I totally got lost.

In despair, I reread the first two essays talking about education and engineering respectively. It really helped! I quickly figured out I could utilize the structure and main theme of the first essay to write my third essay. Also I could discuss how we taught future engineers based on the characteristics of engineering that I defined in the second essay. Therefore, in this essay, I present my understanding of the aim of engineering education and how to educate engineering students to address the general question of what is engineering education. This structure is similar to that of my first essay. For instance, I discuss how to educate based on my definition of what engineering is (ideas of the second essay) and the aims of engineering education (discussed in the first part of this essay). In the last part of this essay, I propose some challenges in regards to engineering educators, which is inspired by the last week’s reading and is something that I found important to bring forward.

Small study looking at our cohort

Purpose:

To understand the similar experiences of our cohort that lead to potential overlap across their habitus' (or disposition).

Research Question:

What are the shared experiences of our cohort? In what ways (if any) might these shared experiences be indicative of overlap across habitus?

Methodology:

1. Developed survey based on the Inez research paper we read and discussed in two of our classes.

2. Distributed the survey as a paper instrument and collected it anonymously.

3. Analyzed the data and write up results for this blog.

Results & Conclusions:

1. There was strong family support for college education but students had much weaker college advising on average (Q1, Q4).

2. ½ of cohort answered that they worked during their undergraduate years. While this is at best a proximate measure of socioeconomic status, the fact that so many held a job could indicate that this half of the cohort were less likely to be from a high socioeconomic status. (Q7)

3. College statistics on major and department changing suggest that the rate of major or department change in our cohort is normal. (Q 13, Q 17, Q18)

Reaching the level of a PhD degree is not equivalent to entering college or vocational school; more effort must be made and recognizable skills must be demonstrated to be accepted. Some of the experiences of our cohort, particularly poor advising and potentially lower socioeconomic status or at least financial hardship during college years work as barriers to college success. Their appears to also be a considerable amount of social support for educational pursuits, from the family, which could facilitate success. These two experiences seem to be at play for many of the members of our cohort and may effect their habitus and their subsequent entry into PhD studies here. More variables may be behind these circumstances, but from the variables we have identified it appears that the barriers were not as resilient as the facilitators for success.

This research is meaningful because it sheds some light on what type of students this department has attracted. It offers an opportunity for some reflexivity and further studying may afford deeper insight into the shared experiences of students attracted to and accepted into this field (in the academic and Bourdieuian sense).

Limits of Research:

1. Small sample size, non randomized sampling. Both undercut ability to conduct statistical analysis.

Next Steps

1. Consider Qualitative Study in the Spring

2. Considering writing paper for a conference

3. Consider expanding to all ENE grad students

References:

DiMaggio, Paul. (1979). Review: On Pierre Bourdieu. The American Journal of Sociology. 84(6) 1460-1474.

Foor, C.E., Walden S.E. & Trytten D.A. (2007). “I Wish That I Belonged More in this Whole Engineering Group:” Achieving Individual Diversity. Journal of Engineering Education. 103-115

Data: The Responses people could give were:

*Really not like my experiences at all* 1

*Not usually what I experienced* 2

*Sometimes occurred or fits my experience* 3

*Often occurred and a pretty good experience fit* 4

*Very close fit to my experiences* 5

*Not able to answer* 6

Graphs:

Class notes for week 12's reading

Professors brought our notes to the classroom today, so I had a chance to take photos of them. Share with anyone who may want to have a look. They follow from the time line of

(Reynolds, 1992)-->(Mann, 1918)-->(Wickenden)-->(Harris, DeLoatch, Grogan, Peden, & Whinnery, 1994)-->(Walker, Pettit, & Hawkins, 1968)

Some thought about practice and research of engineering education

I have been thinking the relationship between practice and research of engineering education from time to time. In this week’s reading, I find this issue is also concerned by many engineering education researchers. It was stated in Prof Adams and Felder’s article (2008) that engineering education researchers were challenged by how to communicate their work with educators to ensure the applications of their research findings. In the report of ASEE (Jamieson & Lohmann, 2009), the authors also pointed out that only a few engineering educators would use educational research results such as learning theories to guide the educational innovations. While there are problems with the applications of educational research to the teaching practice, there are also problems with the justifications of educational research problems due to a lack of practical data (National Academy of Engineering, 2005). When I read engineering education research paper, I find some research problems are not fully justified. I think it could be hazardous to carry out research without really figuring out what the actual situation is in practice. For example, some studies claimed that because the retention rate of engineering student was low, we should look into the problem seriously to figure out the underlying reasons. However, there is representational data showing that the retention rates of engineering majors are actually very high compared to other college majors (Ohland et al., 2008). Also, some studies focused on the improvement of the persistence rate of women in engineering because they wanted that more women could become engineers. But there is also data showing that the persistence rate of women is almost the same as men once they are enrolled in engineering (Xie & Shauman, 2004). The actual cause of small percentage of women engineering student is that far less women enroll in engineering. In my opinion, the research results would be more valuable if the focus is shifted from studying persistence to investigating the enrollment of women engineering student. As novice engineering education researchers, I think we should all keep in mind the justification and evaluation of our research. It is very important that we base our research on a set of carefully gathered data from practical situations and real learning environments.

Reference:

Adams, R. S., & Felder, R. M. (2008). Reframing Professional Development: A Systems Approach to Preparing Engineering Educators to Educate Tomorrow’s Engineers. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(3), 259-261.

Jamieson, L., & Lohmann, J. (2009). Creating a culture for scholarly and systematic innovation in engineering education. Phase 1 report.

National Academy of Engineering. (2005). Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academy of Engineering Press.

Ohland, M. W., Sheppard, S. D., Lichtenstein, G., Eris, O., Chachra, D., & Layton, R. A. (2008). Persistence , Engagement , and Migration in Engineering Programs. Journal of Engineering Education, 97(3), 259-278

Xie, Y., & Shauman, K. (2004). Women in science: Career processes and outcomes. Social Forces, 82(4), 1669-1671.

The importance of Critical thinking in justifying enrollment of more women in engineering

Bix’s two articles talked about the gender issue in engineering. Also, I’ve read some articles doing research on how to enroll more female students in engineering. Usually in these articles, the authors mentioned the importance and necessity of enrolling more women with very limited discussion. I accepted the statistics stated in the introduction part of these articles that women were under-represented in scientific disciplines. But I never thought about the justification of the action of enrolling more women in engineering.

Yesterday I read a paper titled On enrolling more female students in science and engineering (Bouville, 2008). Bouville argued that the belief of enrolling more women in science and engineering was self-evident. He asked for a need to examine the justification of such belief carefully. The article listed several commonly proposed justifications in recruiting more female students: increasing needs of the economic development, higher salaries, the possibility to help others, the necessity and positive impact of diversity, and under-representation. Then Bouville used reasoning and illustration to argue that these statements did not justify the recruitment of more women in science and engineering. Bouville proposed there should be a mutual attraction between women and scientific fields. He further suggested we should give women freedom to choose study fields and allow them to graduate according to their abilities and desires, rather than try to draw as many of them to scientific disciplines as possible.

I agree with most of Bouville’s arguments. The article challenged the fundamental belief of the necessity of enrolling more female students in science and engineering. It reminds me of the importance of critical thinking in justifying a research topic. As the author described, I used to believe universities should encourage and enroll more women in engineering, because they were under-represented and because engineering needed diversity. I accepted such “facts” without carefully examining the justification of them. I did not realize that under-representation was merely a statistical result in itself but was not necessarily bad news. Therefore, we could suggest under-representation should be avoided only if such under-representation is caused by illegitimate action or manner. Meanwhile, even if engineering needed diversity, I don't think it was sufficient to say we should enroll more women because they have new ideas. Otherwise, people who had new ideas should be employed, such as foreign engineers. Moreover, I missed one critical point in my former belief: the attraction of engineering to women. We could not simply suggest to enroll more women in engineering without figuring out whether they really want to choose engineering as their study field.

However, I disagree with one of Bouville’s arguments. He argued that if we told girls that engineering was rewarding and encouraged them to pursue careers as engineers, we were tampering and manipulating them towards engineering. He believed the operation of outreach program (program that gives high school girls early exposure to hands-on experience of engineering) was to make the decision for young girls by choosing what information we wanted to present to them. I disagree with this viewpoint for I believe young girls have their own subjective initiative, which means they are the final decision makers of choosing certain field to study. Engineering outreach programs do provide opportunities for young girls to gain some knowledge and experiences of what engineering is about, and they do encourage young girls to pursue engineer career, but decisions are still left for young girls to make such as the attendance of outreach program and pursuance of engineering career. Also, I wonder how adolescents could generate their interest in certain field without prior experiences related to this field. In choosing certain discipline to study, adolescents would certainly be influenced by external factors such as prior experiences and guidance from parents. As long as outreach programs do not produce a biased image of engineering, I think they should not be blamed for encouraging young girls to engineering.

Reference: Bouville, M. (2008). On enrolling more female students in science and engineering. Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(2), 279-290.

Some thought on the classification of design

When I work on the essay of what is engineering, I use the word “design” to set a boundary for the discipline of engineering. Naturally, I have to think about the meaning of design, why it could separate engineering from other domains. Finally, I build my statement on the four-category of systems design intruduced in Figueiredo’s paper (Figueiredo, 2008): design as functional analysis, design as problem-solving, design as problem-setting, and design as emergent evolutionary learning.

In my understanding, the classification of design into four categories is related to the complexity of the problems that engineers are going to tackle. I begin to analyze the engineering problems that require different category of the design process according to the structure and complexity of the problem. I am confused by the categorization of the problems that require design as emergent evolutionary learning with the problems that require design as problem-setting. In Figueiredo’s paper, design as emergent evolutionary learning is involved in dealing with “ill-structured and complex” problems - the problems are unclear at the started point, the goals are implicit, while design as problem-setting is involved in considering less “ill-structured” problems – the goals and criteria of the problems are unstated but could be discovered or negotiated. In such description, I think there is no clear borderline between these two kinds of problems. As a result, I wonder whether there is a clear classification between design as emergent evolutionary learning and design as problem-setting. When engineers take into account both the problems and their solution to understand a temporary situation (design as emergent evolutionary learning process) and then proceed to another temporary state in the problem-solving process, their decision-making process could also be seen as a kind of discovery of the implicit goals and frame of the problems (design as problem-setting).

In Bowker and Star’s paper, they doubted that there exists a real-world classification system that meets all three requirements listed in their paper. If my interpretation of unclear classification of the four categories of design is right, then it could serve as an example of violating the requirement of “the categories are mutually exclusive”. I become more interested in the examination of existing categorization that I could think about, which will definitely help me understand the theory of classification.

Outsiders’ approach and their interesting viewpoints

From the readings of this week, I find outsiders’ approach to a strange domain as well as their viewpoints of such domain very interesting. Though the authors of the two articles might actually be experts in the fields where they acted as observers, they did depict different kinds of pictures from those seen by insiders.

When stepped into a strange world – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Forsythe kept comparing the unfamiliar fascinating things she observed in AI with the things that an anthropologist was familiar with. She tried to understand how those AI people translate knowledge into computer language, which seemed very weird and challenging from an anthropologist’s point of view. By observation and comparison, she got some very interesting results. For example, she was skeptical about the self-definition as scientists by AI people, and argued that their performances were more like engineers’. Also, she described the way in which AI people thought about knowledge as “I am the world” reasoning, which might never be aware of by the AI researchers as they talked about what knowledge was.

Different from Forsythe’s approach to a new domain that mainly use comparison, Latour and Woolgar tried to refine their understanding of what scientists were doing in the laboratory by asking questions and seeking for answers. Though the questions might seem ignorant to the lab people, they were helpful tools for outsiders to think, to investigate and to be familiar with the strange world. In this process, the observers gradually realized the important “product” that all scientists in the laboratory were working on – articles to be hopefully published in scientific journals. The observers conceived the laboratory equipment to be devices that produced literature, and the scientists were manufacturers of such products. I think the scientists would be amazed by this factory-like description of their daily work.

I think the outsider’s point of view is indispensible in refining a specific domain. Though the insiders may be more familiar with the particulars and culture and knows what’s going on, they might be too close to the situation to see the forest for the trees. For outsiders, they have no stake in the situation, so they could give more objective judgments and offer dramatically different viewpoints that help insider clarify the situation. As was mentioned in Forsythe’s article, the AI people were unaware of the static and narrow view of knowledge they held, which seemed so obvious in an anthropologist’s point of view. The recommendation that AI people should step out of the situation to think about knowledge in different ways would finally help the insiders to meet their own goals.

In the domains of both engineering and education, I’m still an outsider. I find myself approaching the two new domains in a way very similar to that of Forsythe’s – comparing knowledge in the new field with my original background knowledge and try to figure out something different (as could be seen in one of my post http://ene-hp-f10.blogspot.com/2010/09/differences-between-engineer-and.html). By comparison, I'm able to add some unique characters to the new field to help me learn more about the situation. But at this time, I really wish to be an insider to enjoy the moment when outsiders share their amazing viewpoints with me.

Summary of the description of design

After reading two weeks’ articles on the topic of engineering, I come across some different approaches to define what is engineering. As I read more, my uncertainty in understanding the word “engineering” grows. When I read a new article, I keep revisiting articles that I read before and try to find some similarities to help me link the fragment of ideas together. The most unfamiliar word in my understanding of aspect of “engineering” is “design”. Now I want to summarize my understanding related to “design” from the articles of Jonassen et al, Seely, Dorst, and Figueiredo.

The paper written by Jonassen et al. talked mainly about the attributes of workplace problem to address the need of redesigning curricula and experiences that better prepare students for workplace. They did mention a bit about “design problems” by saying that they were the most complex and ill-structured problems, which were usually vaguely defined or had unclear goals with unstated constraints. They said “design problems” had multiple solution paths, solutions and criteria for evaluating solutions.

In Seely’s paper, I simply interpret “design experience” to be problem-solving skills and practical experiences, and “design” to be problem-solving and practice.

I find lots of concepts related to “design” in Dorst’s article, which need to be further digested (especially the underlined phrases). He introduced several people’s approaches to “design”. 1. Simon defined the concept of “well-structured problems” as opposed to “ill-structured problems”, and considered “design” to be the solution to “ill-structured problems”. But in his definition, whether a problem was ill- or well-structured depended on the availability of solution methods, not by the property of the problem itself. 2. Dorst and Cross described “design” as a coevolution of the problem and the solution. 3. Dreyfus and Suchman described “design problems” as situated problems - if the designer thought the situation to be problematic, then the problem was a “design problem”. Meanwhile, the problem-solving steps could be logical, routine, and implicit, without any real choice by the designer. 4. Hatchuel illustrated that “design” was not merely problem solving, but it also contained other processes. 5. Dorst described in his article the term “design” without using “design problem”. He used paradox instead. He illustrated that “design” was the resolution of paradoxes between different aspects in a design situation.

When I revisit Figueiredo’s paper, I find he tried to give an all-sided definition of “design”. He said that the epistemology of “design” was related to “wicked problems” – the problems that were so complex and close interdependence with social and organizational factors that could not be handled by traditional scientific approaches. He stated that the evolution of systems design had been described as incorporating four categories: design as functional analysis, design as problem-solving (Simon’s approach), design as problem-setting, and design as emergent evolutionary learning (Dreyfus and Suchman’s approach).

To this point, the concepts of “design” are still fragments in my mind and need to be integrated. I could just figure out some key words related to “design”: problem-solving, ill-structured problem, vague and unclear. I hope that my understanding of the word “design” will get clearer by reading more materials in following weeks.

Differences between an Engineer and a scientist/mathematician in my eye

The articles about engineering written by Figuoeira, Jonassen, and Koen described engineering from different point of view, but there are some common characteristics in their definition of an engineer: applying science results to solve practical problems, strong problem-solving skills, and using certain criteria for evaluating outcomes. I think they help distinguish an engineer from a scientist/mathematician.

I think the biggest difference between a scientist/mathematician and an engineer is that while a scientist/mathematician concentrates mainly on the research of concept theories, an engineer is adept at applying scientific results to solve practical problems. I had been a mathematics student for six years. Most knowledge I learnt were pure mathematics which included lots of abstract mathematical notations. I was taught to comprehend the meaning of theorems and formulas and gave strict proof of them but never paid much attention to their usage in real-world problems. I used to ask my advisor how I could apply those abstract concepts to solve practical problems. His answer was that a real mathematician never cared about the application of his work. Such applicability should be the concern of an engineer. He cited an example of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler who made important discoveries of Differential Geometry. Euler would never know how vast applications his discoveries would have in the fields of mechanics and engineering problems. In this point, the relationship between scientist/mathematician and engineer is very tight. What a scientist/mathematician discovers is hard to benefit mankind if there is no engineer that can convert it into something of practical use. On the other hand, there will be no theory for engineers to base upon if no scientist/mathematician discovers things.

For engineers, they focus more on how to solve practical problems with scientific results than on figuring out the derivation of theories. Considering the application of mathematical results, often the mathematical models engineers deal with are far more complicated than those taught in mathematics textbook, so it is hard to justify whether certain theories could be used to solve those problems. Using theories in a problem without verifying the satisfaction of all predictions of the theories is very risky in a mathematician’s mind. But for engineers, they care more about the effectiveness of these theories in solving the problem and the rationality of the computed results. Also, due to differences in domain interest, engineers have strong problem-solving skills while scientists/mathematicians are specialized within professional fields and are not good at tackling real-world problems. Moreover, engineers are used to applying certain criteria such as money and time for evaluating outcomes of their work, while scientists/mathematicians hardly evaluate their work by those criteria. For example, scientists had discovered that salt could be separated from water by energy such as electricity. But engineers would consider the high cost of getting distilled water by electricity and doubt its applicability.

Teachers' Role and Teaching Methods-Inspired by Constructivism Theory

I learn from Noddings’ book that constructivism is an epistemology describing how learning happens. The main theme of constructivism is that people generate knowledge actively by their prior experiences and ideas.

Constructivism inspires me that students should play an active role in the learning process to acquire knowledge. Also, teachers should understand the students’ need and use suitable teaching methods. In this point of view, teachers are somewhat like facilitators. They give guidelines and emphasize more on providing learning environments than on teaching the content. For example, instead of just giving lectures that cover the contents of the subject, teachers could raise questions and encourage students to explore the domain, identify problems, and give solutions. I believe students could acquire knowledge more effectively in such self-motivated environments with teachers’ guidance.

Also, according to Jean Piaget, a pioneer of the constructivist theory, different learners construct different knowledge based on their unique internal representations of the world. Students often understand a concept easier if it is presented in a way somehow related to their former experiences in the learning process. This may be one of the reasons why some students grasp knowledge more quickly when they are presented with charts, whereas other students may prefer textual descriptions. Therefore, teacher should recognize the importance of using various teaching methods in class. For example, a math teacher can use different approaches such as graphs and formulas to solve math problems, and a physics teacher can introduce the concept of gravitation by experiments as well as formula derivation. One challenge is that when using different teaching methods, teachers must still manage to cover all the required contents in limited class hours. There should be a balance in between.

My understanding of Existentialism

As a famous expression of Existentialism says “existence precedes essence.” Existentialists emphasize subjectivity and freedom in human beings. They believe one should not be defined as having some “nature”, or to be educated to fit in such role. People should create or choose their own nature by themselves. The education strategy guided by Existentialism differs from what we learnt from Aristotle. Aristotle thought that people all have certain places in life, and their education should be decided accordingly. But how did he know the appropriate “place” of a new born baby? Or who had the right to define another human being’s role so as to give him suitable education? Considering the era Aristotle was in, I think, the role of human being might be defined in such a simple way: the offspring of a slave/leader is designated to be a slave /leader. Again, this preordained hierarchy would be rejected by Existentialists.

I appreciate what Existentialists would say: You are responsible for making yourself. This point of view encourages you to strive for better future – American Dream? However, a question came into my mind: Considering the role of education, will it be difficult to provide the exact kind of education for someone according to his own essence? How do teacher know what essence the student have? How can teacher avoid defining student’s role while providing appropriate guidance to the student?

In China, I notice two kinds of educational methods parents use in bringing up their children. Some parents sign up for piano class for their kids, regardless whether their kids are interested in it or not. Further more, they force their kids to take piano examination to get a certificate for becoming a professional pianist. First, I think ignoring kids’ interest violates what Existentialist proposed. The kids may lose motivations to meet their parents’ expectation. Or even worse, the kids may lose the ability to plan their own career. I will prefer to offer my kids an environment where their choices are highly respected. Do I violate the “freedom” proposition by Existentialists if I advise them to stay away from drugs and cigarette?