Reflection and Metacognition in an Introductory Circuits Course

Stephanie Claussen; Vibhuti Dave

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Conference: 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Publication Date: June 24, 2017
Start Date: June 24, 2017
End Date: June 28, 2017
Conference Session: Electrical and Computer Division Technical Session 10
Tagged Division: Electrical and Computer
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 15
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--28788
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/28788
Download Count: 561

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Paper Authors

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Stephanie Claussen Colorado School of Mines

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Stephanie Claussen’s experience spans both engineering and education research. She obtained her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. Her Ph.D. work at Stanford University focused on optoelectronics, and she continues that work in her position at the Colorado School of Mines, primarily with the involvement of undergraduate researchers. In her role as an Associate Teaching Professor, she is primarily tasked with the education of undergraduate engineers. In her courses, she employs active learning techniques and project-based learning. Her previous education research, also at Stanford, focused on the role of cultural capital in science education. Her current interests include the study of engineering students' development of social responsibility and the impact of students' backgrounds in their formation as engineers.

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Vibhuti Dave Colorado School of Mines

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Dr. Vibhuti Dave joined Penn State Erie, The Behrend College as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering program in Fall 2007. She received her undergraduate engineering degree in the field of Electronics and Communication from Nirma Institute of Technology, India in 2000. She received her M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. (2007) in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL.

Dr. Dave’s research interests lie in the field of High Speed Computer Arithmetic and Computer Architecture. Her research has been focused on the design high-speed multi-operand adders. In addition, she is also interested in performing research in VLSI implementation of signal processing algorithms, and low power integrated circuit design.

Her teaching interests include Digital Logic Design, Computer Architecture, Computer Arithmetic, VLSI Design.

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Abstract

There are increasingly frequent calls to incorporate reflection into engineering education. Much of this past focus has been on the use of reflection in teaching engineering design (e.g. Adams et al., 2003; Cross, 2004). However, there is also a perceived value in incorporating reflective practices into courses which are not specifically focused on design. If we are able to incorporate reflection into what “the students learn engineering to be” (Jolly, 1999)—meaning, the engineering science courses which make up the vast majority of most undergraduate curricula—reflection is expected to contribute to learning outcomes and students’ development of metacognitive and social skills (Kavanagh, 2008).

Because exams are generally used for formative assessment, they are rarely also leveraged as an opportunity for students to measure their learning with an eye toward improvement, developing reflection skills in the process. A few researchers have previously designed assignments in which students reflect on their exam performance and characterize the errors that were made (Wynne, 2010; Benson and Zhu, 2015). However, a systematic comparison of the learning achieved by students who complete exam reflection exercises and a comparable group of students who complete a control exercise has not been previously done.

We have initiated such research by adapting Benson and Zhu’s tool (2015), which they refer to as the Exam Analysis and Reflection (EAR) procedure, in an introductory electrical circuits course. In their work, Benson and Zhu ask students to respond to three reflection prompts for each question they got wrong on an exam. The prompts lead the students through identifying and analyzing the mistakes they made and proposing what they can do to avoid similar issues in the future.

This study employs the EAR in a large introductory circuits course for non-majors. The multi-section, multi-instructor nature of the course provides a natural platform for building upon Benson and Zhu’s work. This study began in the fall of 2015. Over the three semesters since it began, we have split the sections of the course into an intervention group, where the adapted EAR process is followed after each exam as an optional extra credit exercise, and a control group, in which students are given the option of extra credit by solving an additional problem. In two occasions, we had a control section and intervention section both taught by the same instructor in the same semester, which provides particularly rich comparison data.

We have collected data related to student participation, the quality of their work in both the control and the interventions, and the scores on their final examination. In our paper, the analysis of this data will be presented to determine the efficacy of the EAR and understand if this form of reflection can lead to improved student learning outcomes in undergraduate engineering education.

Citation
Format

Claussen, S., & Dave, V. (2017, June), Reflection and Metacognition in an Introductory Circuits Course Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--28788

TY - CPAPER
AB - There are increasingly frequent calls to incorporate reflection into engineering education. Much of this past focus has been on the use of reflection in teaching engineering design (e.g. Adams et al., 2003; Cross, 2004). However, there is also a perceived value in incorporating reflective practices into courses which are not specifically focused on design. If we are able to incorporate reflection into what “the students learn engineering to be” (Jolly, 1999)—meaning, the engineering science courses which make up the vast majority of most undergraduate curricula—reflection is expected to contribute to learning outcomes and students’ development of metacognitive and social skills (Kavanagh, 2008).

Because exams are generally used for formative assessment, they are rarely also leveraged as an opportunity for students to measure their learning with an eye toward improvement, developing reflection skills in the process. A few researchers have previously designed assignments in which students reflect on their exam performance and characterize the errors that were made (Wynne, 2010; Benson and Zhu, 2015). However, a systematic comparison of the learning achieved by students who complete exam reflection exercises and a comparable group of students who complete a control exercise has not been previously done.

We have initiated such research by adapting Benson and Zhu’s tool (2015), which they refer to as the Exam Analysis and Reflection (EAR) procedure, in an introductory electrical circuits course. In their work, Benson and Zhu ask students to respond to three reflection prompts for each question they got wrong on an exam. The prompts lead the students through identifying and analyzing the mistakes they made and proposing what they can do to avoid similar issues in the future.

This study employs the EAR in a large introductory circuits course for non-majors. The multi-section, multi-instructor nature of the course provides a natural platform for building upon Benson and Zhu’s work. This study began in the fall of 2015. Over the three semesters since it began, we have split the sections of the course into an intervention group, where the adapted EAR process is followed after each exam as an optional extra credit exercise, and a control group, in which students are given the option of extra credit by solving an additional problem. In two occasions, we had a control section and intervention section both taught by the same instructor in the same semester, which provides particularly rich comparison data.

We have collected data related to student participation, the quality of their work in both the control and the interventions, and the scores on their final examination. In our paper, the analysis of this data will be presented to determine the efficacy of the EAR and understand if this form of reflection can lead to improved student learning outcomes in undergraduate engineering education.
AU - Stephanie Claussen
AU - Vibhuti Dave
CY - Columbus, Ohio
DA - 2017/06/24
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Reflection and Metacognition in an Introductory Circuits Course
UR - https://peer.asee.org/28788
DO - 10.18260/1-2--28788
ER -