Collaborative Learning vs. Lecture/Discussion: Students' Reported Learning Gains*

This study examined the extent to which undergraduate engineering courses taught using active and collaborative learning methods differ from traditional lecture and discussion courses in their ability to promote the development of students' engineering design, problem‐solving, communication, and group participation skills. Evidence for the study comes from 480 students enrolled in 17 active or collaborative learning courses/sections and six traditional courses/sections at six engineering schools. Results indicate that active or collaborative methods produce both statistically significant and substantially greater gains in student learning than those associated with more traditional instructional methods. These learning advantages remained even when differences in a variety of student pre‐course characteristics were controlled.     

Lessons Learned: Implementing the Case Teaching Method in a Mechanical Engineering Course

Background Case studies have been found to increase students' critical thinking and problem‐solving skills, higher‐order thinking skills, conceptual change, and their motivation to learn. Despite the popularity of the case study approach within engineering, the empirical research on the effectiveness of case studies is limited and the research that does exist has primarily focused on student perceptions of their learning rather than actual learning outcomes. Purpose (Hypothesis ) This paper describes an investigation of the impact of case‐based instruction on undergraduate mechanical engineering students' conceptual understanding and their attitudes towards the use of case studies. Design /Method Seventy‐three students from two sections of the same mechanical engineering course participated in this study. The two sections were both taught using traditional lecture and case teaching methods. Participants completed pre‐tests, post‐tests, and a survey to assess their conceptual understanding and engagement. Results Results suggested that the majority of participants felt the use of case studies was engaging and added a lot of realism to the class. There were no significant differences between traditional lecture and case teaching method on students' conceptual understanding. However, the use of case studies did no harm to students' understanding while making the content more relevant to students. Conclusions Case‐based instruction can be beneficial for students in terms of actively engaging them and allowing them to see the application and/or relevance of engineering to the real world.     

Inductive Teaching and Learning Methods: Definitions,Comparisons, and Research Bases

Traditional engineering instruction is deductive, beginning with theories and progressing to the applications of those theories. Alternative teaching approaches are more inductive. Topics are introduced by presenting specific observations, case studies or problems, and theories are taught or the students are helped to discover them only after the need to know them has been established. This study reviews several of the most commonly used inductive teaching methods, including inquiry learning, problem‐based learning, project‐based learning, case‐based teaching, discovery learning, and just‐in‐time teaching. The paper defines each method, highlights commonalities and specific differences, and reviews research on the effectiveness of the methods. While the strength of the evidence varies from one method to another, inductive methods are consistently found to be at least equal to, and in general more effective than, traditional deductive methods for achieving a broad range of learning outcomes.     

Student Performance and Acceptance of Instructional Technology: Comparing Technology‐Enhanced and Traditional Instruction for a Course in Statics

The College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati has evaluated the use of instructional technologies to improve the learning process for students in fundamental engineering science courses. The goal of this effort was to both retain more students in engineering programs and improve student performance through appropriate use of technology. Four modes of instruction were used to teach an engineering fundamentals course in statics. A traditional instructor‐led course, a Web‐assisted course, a streaming media course, and an interactive video course were all presented using a common syllabus, homework, tests, and grading regimen. Evaluations of final course grades indicate that use of instructional technology improved student performance when compared with traditional teaching methods. Student satisfaction with technology varied considerably with the Web‐assisted format having the highest student approval rating of the technologies. The results indicate that time on task and interest in content can be improved through the appropriate use of technology.     

Conceptual Difficulties Experienced by Trained Engineers Learning Educational Research Methods

This paper describes conceptual difficulties that may be experienced by engineering faculty as they become engineering education researchers. Observation, survey, and assessment data collected at the 2005 NSF‐funded Rigorous Research in Engineering Education workshop were systematically analyzed to uncover the five difficulties encountered by engineering faculty learning to design rigorous education studies: (1) framing research questions with broad appeal, (2) grounding research in a theoretical framework, (3) fully considering operationalization and measurement of constructs, (4) appreciating qualitative or mixed‐methods approaches, and (5) pursuing interdisciplinary collaboration. The first four can be understood in terms of disciplinary consensus; they represent explicit steps in education research that are implicit in technical engineering research because there is greater consensus of methods and standards. This work better frames the issue of rigor in engineering education research by clarifying the fundamental differences that prevent application of traditional engineering standards of rigor directly to engineering education research.     

The Role of Collaborative Reflection on Shaping Engineering Faculty Teaching Approaches

Over the last several years, engineering faculty and learning scientists from four universities worked in collaboration to develop educational materials to improve the quality of faculty teaching and student learning. Guided by the How People Learn (HPL) framework, engineering faculty worked in collaboration with learning scientists to develop learner‐centered, student‐focused instructional methods. In consultation with learning scientists, engineering faculty carried out educational inquiry in their classrooms aimed at investigating student learning and enhancing instruction. In this paper we discuss the extent to which faculty engaged in these collaborative endeavors and how their teaching approaches differed as a result of their level of engagement. Study findings reveal the role that collaborative reflection plays in shaping teaching approaches. Results from this study provide insights for researchers and other practitioners in engineering and higher education interested in implementing engineering faculty development programs to optimize the impact on teaching.     

Characterizing Design Learning: A Mixed‐Methods Study of Engineering Designers' Use of Language

Using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods to examine engineering design learning, we found that students taking a course in engineering design and/or studying engineering for four years acquired engineering design language that is common to a larger community of practice as well as common to their own programs and institutions of higher learning. The study also suggests that engineering design language shapes the knowledge that students have about engineering design. Finally, students did not always put their design knowledge into practice, suggesting the need for educational improvements and research to bridge this gap.     

Something Old,Something New: Integrating Engineering Practice into the Teaching of Engineering Mechanics

This paper presents a multifaceted method for teaching engineering mechanics designed to satisfy the following set of desiderata: (1) integrate engineering practice into the teaching of engineering science; (2) address a wide set of learning styles; (3) provide opportunities for practice in group work and learning; (4) promote communication and synthesizing skills; (5) engage students in the teaching and learning process; (6) maintain traditional achievement levels with respect to traditional measures; (7) motivate students to continue their engineering studies; and (8) maintain reasonable resource demands. Consistent with this variety of objectives, the approach presented here is composed of a variety of ingredients. In addition to the standard homework problems and exams, these ingredients include design projects, group work, basic competency exams, computational environments for simulating and visualizing phenomena, multimedia instructional tools, hands-on experiences, and student presentations. This educational model is intended to be suitable for teaching engineering mechanics in general, but this paper focuses on a particular sophomore-level mechanics of materials course in which the method has been implemented, refined over several years of classroom use, and tested relative to traditional approaches. The paper describes the and techniques that together make up the method, followed by summaries of the results of evaluations that have been applied to the course.     

Promoting Active Learning with Cases and Instructional Modules

In this paper, we propose the use of cases and instructional modules to teach invention, engineering design, and elements of technology management. One way to learn is to study and reflect upon the experience of others. Such experience may be captured in a case. Cases promote active learning by requiring students to assume the roles of participants in the decision making process. Cases are also a vehicle for raising business issues and human resources concerns not usually considered in traditional engineering courses. Real world design and engineering involves risk and uncertainty, tradeoffs and priorities, ethical issues, human elements, and impact assessment. Cases expose students to open ended, ill defined problems whose solution often depends on making assessments, judgments, and decisions about the technical competencies of the organization.     

Failure and reliability prediction by support vector machines regression of time series data

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are kernel-based learning methods, which have been successfully adopted for regression problems. However, their use in reliability applications has not been widely explored. In this paper, a comparative analysis is presented in order to evaluate the SVM effectiveness in forecasting time-to-failure and reliability of engineered components based on time series data. The performance on literature case studies of SVM regression is measured against other advanced learning methods such as the Radial Basis Function, the traditional MultiLayer Perceptron model, Box-Jenkins autoregressive-integrated-moving average and the Infinite Impulse Response Locally Recurrent Neural Networks. The comparison shows that in the analyzed cases, SVM outperforms or is comparable to other techniques.     

Implementation of Interdisciplinary Group Learning and Peer Assessment in a Nanotechnology Engineering Course

Nanotechnology is an inherently interdisciplinary field that has generated significant scientific and engineering interest in recent years. In an effort to convey the excitement and opportunities surrounding this discipline to senior undergraduate students and junior graduate students, a nanotechnology engineering course has been developed in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University over the past two years. This paper examines the unique challenges facing educators in this dynamic, emerging field and describes an approach for the design of a nanotechnology engineering course employing the non‐traditional pedagogical practices of collaborative group learning, interdisciplinary learning, problem‐based learning, and peer assessment. Utilizing the same nanotechnology course given the year before as a historical control, analysis of the difference between measures of student performance and student experience over the two years indicates that these practices are successful and provide an educationally informed template for other newly developed engineering courses.     

Teaching Communication in Capstone Design: The Role of the Instructor in Situated Learning

Calls for engineers to communicate more effectively are ubiquitous, and engineering education literature includes numerous examples of assignments and courses that integrate writing and speaking with technical content. However, little of this literature examines in detail how engineering students develop communication skills and how those learning mechanisms influence classroom practice. To address this gap, this article synthesizes research on communication learning in college from the fields of composition and technical communication and illustrates its relevance to the engineering classroom with a case study of a capstone design course. The principles of situated learning and activity theory, in particular, provide strong evidence that the ways in which course instructors and students interact around communication tasks play a significant role in helping students develop transferable communication skills.     

齐彭代尔设计思想对新中式家具的启示

目的 通过研究齐彭代尔的设计思想和设计方法,重新审视新中式家具中传统文化元素的感知方式和设计思考路径,探究传统文化元素在新中式家具设计中的应用策略,为新中式家具设计提供持续的创造源泉。方法 通过对齐彭代尔设计作品的梳理,结合当下新中式家具的设计现状,针对性地分析齐彭代尔的设计方法,并导入实际工程项目进行设计实践与论证。结论 新中式家具并非传统中式家具的改良产品或者次生品,而是与传统中式家具平行且独立的当代“东方（或中国）”家具成果,将传统文化引入现代的家具设计,可以带来更多的可能性,也是我国未来家具产业发展的趋势。齐彭代尔家具设计兼容并蓄,大胆破立,并且形成了系统的设计方法,值得在探索新中式家具的研发与创新中进行学习和借鉴。     

Artificial Intelligence in Material Engineering: A Review on Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Material Engineering

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in material science and engineering (MSE) is becoming increasingly important as AI technology advances. The development of high-performance computing has made it possible to test deep learning (DL) models with significant parameters, providing an opportunity to overcome the limitation of traditional computational methods, such as density functional theory (DFT), in property prediction. Machine learning (ML)-based methods are faster and more accurate than DFT-based methods. Furthermore, the generative adversarial networks (GANs) have facilitated the generation of chemical compositions of inorganic materials without using crystal structure information. These developments have significantly impacted material engineering (ME) and research. Some of the latest developments in AI in ME herein are reviewed. First, the development of AI in the critical areas of ME, such as in material processing, the study of structure and material property, and measuring the performance of materials in various aspects, is discussed. Then, the significant methods of AI and their uses in MSE, such as graph neural network, generative models, transfer of learning, etc. are discussed. The use of AI to analyze the results from existing analytical instruments is also discussed. Finally, AI's advantages, disadvantages, and future in ME are discussed.     

Review of Text Classification Methods on Deep Learning

Text classification has always been an increasingly crucial topic in natural language processing. Traditional text classification methods based on machine learning have many disadvantages such as dimension explosion, data sparsity, limited generalization ability and so on. Based on deep learning text classification, this paper presents an extensive study on the text classification models including Convolutional Neural Network-Based (CNN-Based), Recurrent Neural Network-Based (RNN-based), Attention Mechanisms-Based and so on. Many studies have proved that text classification methods based on deep learning outperform the traditional methods when processing large-scale and complex datasets. The main reasons are text classification methods based on deep learning can avoid cumbersome feature extraction process and have higher prediction accuracy for a large set of unstructured data. In this paper, we also summarize the shortcomings of traditional text classification methods and introduce the text classification process based on deep learning including text preprocessing, distributed representation of text, text classification model construction based on deep learning and performance evaluation.     

Efficacy of Interactive Internet‐Based Education in Structural Timber Design

While traditional teaching methods (e.g., real‐time, synchronous lectures) have proven effective for training future engineers, the Internet provides an avenue to reinforce the material and augment student learning, comprehension, and retention of material. This paper presents the integration and assessment of a library of interactive instructional modules specifically for a senior‐level undergraduate elective course in civil engineering. An ongoing, comprehensive assessment process was implemented in the fall 1999 semester. The results of this quantitative assessment indicate that the use of well designed and pedagogically sound Internet‐based supplemental modules provide students with a better understanding of course material. However, when Internet‐based content does not promote critical thinking, little increase in the student performance and understanding of the material is realized. Interactive Web‐based instruction should not be viewed as a “replacement” to traditional instruction, but rather a tool that provides a broader and more dynamic environment for students with a variety of learning styles.     

A Model for On-Line Learning Networks in Engineering Education

This paper describes a model for implementing on-line learning in engineering education. Relationships between traditional learning strategies and network-enabled engineering education are discussed. The model proposed is based on a World Wide Web implementation that includes presentation materials, on-line conferencing, demonstrations, and interactive capabilities that permit computer-mediated question and answer sessions. An example of a course implemented using these techniques for a first year engineering course is given. Guidance for engineering educators who wish to implement components of the model is provided.     

Revitalising the engineering curriculum: the role of informationtechnology

The traditional engineering curriculum, based for the most part on classical science and nineteenth century mathematics, is inappropriate for educating engineers for the 21st century. Modern computer tools can be used both to shift the emphasis of the curriculum and to improve the quality of learning, but are rarely exploited to best effect. This paper reviews the potential of IT in engineering education with reference to different aspects of the learning process     

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Computer Tutorials Versus Traditional Lecturing in Accounting Topics

Colleges and universities are continually making efforts to incorporate computers and technology into the varied aspects of their teaching environments. However, it is difficult to distinguish the effectiveness of these machine tutors from their human counterparts. There has been much debate about technology‐based instructional strategies in learning environments. This article addresses one issue of that debate—the effectiveness of teaching undergraduate engineering students using computer‐mediated tutorials versus traditional lecturing. Specifically, this research compared student test scores using computer‐mediated accounting tutorials alone with those of students who received traditional lectures and computer‐mediated tutorials on the same topic. Statistical analyses were performed to determine which was a better instructional method. Based on previous research by the authors and other published research, it was hypothesized that both methods would be satisfactory instructional tools and yield similar educational results. The results indicate that there was no statistically significant difference between the two methods. This was consistent with previous studies. This study concludes that computer‐mediated tutorials could be substituted for traditional lectures without impacting what a student learns—at least for teaching accounting fundamentals.     

基于建构主义学习理论的工程图学实践

重点阐述了建构主义学习模式以及其指导下几种新的教学方法,以工程图学二、三维教学相结合为教学改革突破口,运用该模式践行工程图学实践,取得了良好的效果。总结了建构主义学习理论指导下的一般践行程序,为应用该理论开展教学改革提供了一个新的视角。