Introducing Teaching and Learning Insights!
Teaching and Learning Insights (TLI) is designed to build community and share
knowledge about teaching and learning throughout the College of Engineering. A COE
2010 project, TLI will be distributed once a month by the Engineering Learning Center,
in collaboration with the COE Climate and Diversity Committee. TLI is intended to
communicate strategies and supporting research related to teaching and learning in
college classrooms to all faculty, instructional staff, and students.
If you have any feedback to share, or an item you would like to have considered for inclusion in a future edition of TLI, please send it to the Engineering Learning Center at elc@engr.wisc.edu.
Grand Challenges: Technological Literacy and Increasing Diversity
Relatively few people outside of the engineering disciplines understand the
real work of engineers. Engineering gets little attention in our schools'
science curricula, and while major engineering challenges related to urban
infrastructure, safe food and clean water, and sustainable energy frequent
the news headlines, they are seldom recognized as such.
Susan Hagness, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, believes that this lack of public knowledge about engineering can and should be addressed through education. Working with five faculty members from across the COE and a grant from the 2010 Project, she has recently completed a pilot run as the PI of a course, "Introduction to Society's Engineering Grand Challenges," that tackles this very problem. (Read more...)
Finding and Sharing Exciting Results
When Paul Evans,
assistant professor of
Materials Science and Engineering,
decided to include student presentations in his
Electronic, Optical, and Magnetic Properties of Materials
course, he initially thought that the work of creating slides and presenting
reviews of research would help his students to become more comfortable with
presentation skills.
"But," Evans says, "that turned out not to be the case. Undergraduates in the College of Engineering are already very used to that because they have been presenting their projects in front of groups for a long time" by the time they have settled into the Materials Science department and take his elective class as juniors or seniors.
Instead, Evans has found that the most significant benefits of his students' project work - which includes choosing a topic, researching the field around the topic, selecting a significant recent result, discussing the importance of that result in front of the larger class, and writing up the presentation as a paper - are the questions and the interests that students develop as they work on their projects during the semester. (Read more...)
Bringing Student Experience into the Classroom
Stephanie Schmidt
has known for a long time that she wants to become a teacher and an environmental
researcher.
"I think there were just so many teaching and learning concepts that I was superficially aware of because I was a student at a small school where teaching was emphasized," she says, as she explains how excited she is about her plan to become a professor at a small liberal arts college.
When Schmidt, a doctoral student in the Limnology and Marine Sciences Program (an affiliate of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and GERS fellow, graduates at the end of this summer, she will go onto a teaching post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the Consortium for Faculty Diversity at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.
"It's a great program because it gets people teaching experience that they otherwise wouldn't get in grad school. For someone like me who wants to be at a small liberal arts school, a school that's focused on teaching, it's ideal. I'm very excited to get that kind of experience, and to continue working on my research. I'll be team-teaching in the fall, teaching my own class in the spring, and there's going to be exciting opportunities for research collaboration, too." (Read more...)
Assessment Series #5 - Poster Sessions
The poster session is an assessment tool that has become increasingly popular in courses where the syllabus calls for extended student work on individual projects, team research, or design challenges.
Poster sessions, in which students create poster presentations to present project work that they have completed individually or in small teams, are flexible assessments which allow students to interact with each other in addition to being evaluated by their instructors.
They can work as effective assessments for students at many different levels. The Department of Biomedical Engineering, for example, includes participation in a final poster session for each of their design courses, from sophomore-level to senior-level, and the teaching team of Introduction to Society's Engineering Grand Challenges recently hosted a successful poster session for their freshman-level course.
Additionally, posters provide authentic practice and assessment for students who plan to continue into engineering graduate school or industry. Conferences often include poster sessions, and so preparing posters for courses allows students to gain valuable practice in both their information design skills and their presentation skills. (Read more...)
