Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning: A New Tool for Helping Students See the Big Picture

Suzanne Lane; Andreas Karatsolis; Donald R. Sadoway

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Conference: 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana
Publication Date: June 26, 2016
Start Date: June 26, 2016
End Date: June 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-68565-5
ISSN: 2153-5965
Conference Session: Materials Division Technical Session 1
Tagged Division: Materials
Page Count: 14
DOI: 10.18260/p.25686
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/25686
Download Count: 705

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Paper Authors

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Suzanne Lane Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Suzanne Lane directs the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program (WRAP) at MIT, is a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, and teaches communication in many engineering departments She also directs the associated lab, ArchiMedia, which studies how new media are shaping professional communication practices, and designs new digital tools for teaching communication.

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Andreas Karatsolis Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Andreas Karatsolis is the Associate Director of Writing,Rhetoric and Professional Communication as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His disciplinary training includes a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Communication with an emphasis on technical/professional communication in science-related fields, which is at the core of his teaching and research efforts. In his position at MIT and as a member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, he is primarily interested in designing curricula and tools which can help engineers and scientists develop life-long competencies in communication. In the past seven years he has also been the Lead of co-Principal Investigator in projects related to the design, implementation and assessment of learning technologies, especially in the domains of language learning, health communication and public discourse.

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Donald R. Sadoway Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Donald R. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained the B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science, the M.A.Sc. in Chemical Metallurgy, and the Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy, all from the University of Toronto. After a year at MIT as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Sadoway joined the faculty in 1978. The author of over 150 scientific papers and holder of 23 U.S. patents, his research is directed towards the development of rechargeable batteries and environmentally sound technologies for the extraction of metals. To push these ideas from lab bench to marketplace, he is the founder of two companies, Ambri and Boston Electrometallurgical. With recordings of his chemistry lectures broadcast throughout the world on MIT OpenCourseWare, his impact on engineering education extends far beyond the lecture hall at MIT. Viewed over 1,600,000 times, his TED talk is a narrative about inventing inventors as much as it is about inventing technology. In 2012 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

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Abstract

Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning: A New Tool for Helping Students See the Big Picture

For students beginning their studies in Materials, gaining an understanding of how new concepts and methods connect to each other can be a challenge that delays their overall understanding of Materials Science and Engineering as a discipline. As they struggle to understand the relationship between any material’s properties and the chemical and molecular structure that gives rise to those properties, they can often lose sight of the contexts in which the materials’ properties matter, the patterns of relationships between materials in a [class], or the reasoning that allows one to predict how different processes will transform the structure, and thus the properties, of various materials. Students also struggle with clearly communicating their new knowledge; lab reports by introductory students tend to focus on actions rather than the purposes of those actions, and often lack a sense of the reasoning that ties the various actions together into a coherent experimental design. This paper explains the development of a new tool, the Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning Diagram, designed to provide students with a framework of relationships between central concepts in Materials Science and Engineering, and to unite disciplinary knowledge and reasoning with rhetorical concepts of genre, audience, and purpose. This tool was designed through a collaborative process between faculty in Materials and those in professional communication, and takes the form of a visual schematic that students can use to map the relationship of concepts in an experiment; to scaffold the process of reading literature in the field; to storyboard a slide presentation or design a poster; and to outline paths of explanation for communicating technical knowledge to various audiences. The MSE Reasoning Diagram, with a number of interactive lessons and activities, has been used in an introductory MSE lab course, as well as with students writing senior theses and preparing reports and presentations on internships. The effectiveness of the reasoning diagram has been assessed through a number of measures, including student feedback in focus groups and pre and post intervention surveys. The results show significant learning gains in (i) students’ disciplinary understanding; and (ii) their rhetorical understanding of how to communicate their disciplinary knowledge for different audiences and purposes.

Citation
Format

Lane, S., & Karatsolis, A., & Sadoway, D. R. (2016, June), Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning: A New Tool for Helping Students See the Big Picture Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.25686

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning:
A New Tool for Helping Students See the Big Picture

For students beginning their studies in Materials, gaining an understanding of how new concepts and methods connect to each other can be a challenge that delays their overall understanding of Materials Science and Engineering as a discipline.  As they struggle to understand the relationship between any material’s properties and the chemical and molecular structure that gives rise to those properties, they can often lose sight of the contexts in which the materials’ properties matter, the patterns of relationships between materials in a [class], or the reasoning that allows one to predict how different processes will transform the structure, and thus the properties, of various materials.  Students also struggle with clearly communicating their new knowledge; lab reports by introductory students tend to focus on actions rather than the purposes of those actions, and often lack a sense of the reasoning that ties the various actions together into a coherent experimental design.
This paper explains the development of a new tool, the Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning Diagram, designed to provide students with a framework of relationships between central concepts in Materials Science and Engineering, and to unite disciplinary knowledge and reasoning with rhetorical concepts of genre, audience, and purpose.  This tool was designed through a collaborative process between faculty in Materials and those in professional communication, and takes the form of a visual schematic that students can use to map the relationship of concepts in an experiment; to scaffold the process of reading literature in the field; to storyboard a slide presentation or design a poster; and to outline paths of explanation for communicating technical knowledge to various audiences.  The MSE Reasoning Diagram, with a number of interactive lessons and activities, has been used in an introductory MSE lab course, as well as with students writing senior theses and preparing reports and presentations on internships.  
The effectiveness of the reasoning diagram has been assessed through a number of measures, including student feedback in focus groups and pre and post intervention surveys.  The results show significant learning gains in (i) students’ disciplinary understanding; and (ii) their rhetorical understanding of how to communicate their disciplinary knowledge for different audiences and purposes.

AU  - Suzanne Lane
AU  - Andreas Karatsolis
AU  - Donald R. Sadoway
CY  - New Orleans, Louisiana
DA  - 2016/06/26
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Materials Science and Engineering Reasoning: A New Tool for Helping Students See the Big Picture
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/25686
DO  - 10.18260/p.25686
ER  -