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Learning and Autonomy in Engineering Design Dr H T Pearce Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Cape Town htp@eng.uct.ac.za
Introduction The political transformation of South Africa over the last decade has increased the pace of change within the university classroom. One of those changes is similar to the worldwide phenomenon related to massification of education, that of growing disparity in the educational backgrounds and experiences of students. This appears to have a greater impact in a class like design than it has in, say mathematics, because of the reliance design places on the designer’s relationship to the world of artifacts. Experience is everything!
Two students sitting next to each other in a classroom may well have had such different educational and home backgrounds that any assumptions made by the lecturer will certainly not be true for both. Each has achieved similar passes on the school leaving examination, and yet when they enter an engineering program their apparent ability to cope is significantly different.
Retention rates are also not yet good enough particularly amongst black students. This is similar to the position outlined by Spring and Schonberg for universities in the USA. In South Africa the situation is that it is imperative that we do not lose many students because the size of the population that is even somewhat prepared for entry to an engineering program is very small and the need for engineers in the future is likely to be substantial. The need is very different from that in a country like the USA – it is not so much a matter of global competitiveness as it is a matter of infrastructure maintenance and development. Spring and Schonberg summarize "today’s students are less well prepared than in years past (while engineering curricula have necessarily become even more demanding), yet when well prepared tend to remain enrolled".
The reality in South Africa is that many students are now not adequately prepared for studying engineering. The school system has failed these students and it will take a good number of years before the numbers of well-prepared students begins to increase sufficiently that the engineering colleges will benefit markedly. In the meantime, the faculties of engineering must find ways to assist the individuals in the classrooms.
This paper explores these questions in the context of a sophomore Design course in Mechanical engineering. The nature of "preparedness" and "student development" is in question. Two issues are raised concurrently: that of the extent to which even well-prepared students can be pushed to respond to ill-defined problems, and the difference between the well-prepared student and those whose schooling has left them poorly prepared and with little experience in the ways of thinking expected of them in an engineering program.
Kellogg and Vogel imply that although the trend in the USA is towards design becoming central in the curriculum, that situation is far from being reached. Some of their reasons for this are that
In this regard the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Cape Town has taken design seriously and has a strong core design sequence. It begins with the Engineering Drawing and Engineering I courses in the first year and proceeds with Design I, II and III in the three subsequent years. Each of these constitutes about 20% of the credits per year. The focus in this paper is on theoretical issues of learning raised by the mid-year results and interviews with students in the Design I course. The intention is to bring the debate into the open regarding how to achieve the substantial aims of the course given the diversity of student and what we know about how students develop cognitively.
Experience and Worldview
Home background and education shapes not only a person’s worldview in a broad sense but the very way they interact with the people and events of life each day. This is also true of their learning. Different people approach learning differently (Felder) and are able to grasp the essence of a new concept or task at various rates and with varying clarity based on their prior learning and exposure to related concepts, tasks and experiences. However, engineering educators seldom take this into account when dealing with a class of diverse students. The expectation is that students simply adjust to the demands of the course. How they do that is not the business of the instructor. This is also reflected in the way we examine courses, and a low mark in a course means that the student is either not really capable of the cognitive demands of the course or has failed to adjust adequately in the scheduled time. This line of thinking leads us into asking about student development – how students adjust to new ways of thinking and learning as they enter university.
Wells, commenting on Vygotsky’s theory of human development, states it thus,
It is very clear that those formative events are vastly different for the range of students now entering tertiary education. This has an immense impact upon the way we should be thinking about creating an appropriate environment and learning activities.
Both the issues highlighted in the introduction (the difference between the preparation and background of students and the ability of students to move to independent solution of ill-defined problems) raise the question of the development of the cognitive abilities of students as they proceed through a university degree, in this case engineering. Wankat and Oreovicz outline Perry’s conception of the stages of student development from an essentially dualistic view of the world and learning through to one that incorporates multiplicity, relativism and a commitment to independent thought (the autonomous learner). Montgomery argues that if we wish to assist students to develop their learning and thinking skills more effectively along the lines of Perry’s theory of development or Kolb’s learning cycle, "traditional engineering education must be supplemented with a greater design component". This has been done to a significant degree at UCT, but the question still remains as to how fast and in what manner can students effectively be moved towards autonomy and multiplicity in their thinking?
Teaching and Learning
In practice, we generally continue to expect these different students to respond in the same (pre-determined) way to a learning activity and try to force our own concept and pace of learning onto students. It is not easy to avoid this given the nature of the academic year (being of limited duration) and the types of assessment practices that we find necessary (not having found better ways than a stressful exam for many kinds of courses).
The goals of most faculty members would be to encourage in students the ability to become autonomous or independent learners. This ability translates into a developing skill of problem solving, making the transition from exercises to well-defined closed-ended problems to well-defined open-ended problems to ill-defined open-ended problems. The latter two categories can be thought of as the sort of problem that a designer faces, although the former two types are probably just as, if not more, common in the design office where it is still necessary to compute for example, stresses in a crankshaft as part of a larger design task.
It is the ability to make decisions and tackle these sometimes ill-defined open-ended problems that we wish to encourage and inspire in students. We also want to achieve this early in their degree program so that they can gain the most from the experience.
But my colleagues also believe that university is so different from school that it is imperative to get away from the rote learning, molly-coddling, spoon-feeding, hand-holding environment that school provided (if indeed that was the experience of the students). We want to move them as quickly as possible to adopt professional skills and to experience the way that the real world will treat them. How does this accord with our pedagogical demands?
I must also comment here that the ability of teachers to make judgments regarding the school-readiness of young children is impressive and has resulted from extensive research being undertaken by the psychology community into the nature of learning. By the time those children reach university we are seemingly far less able to make similar assessments of the ability (potential) of students to succeed. This may be in part because the factors affecting success have grown too numerous as well as the dispersion (diffusion) effect that years of different schooling and social interaction will have had.
Design
The activities that may be lumped under the general description "design" are crucial sorts of activities, being different from the more analytical courses in their cognitive demands and the need for specific kinds of experience. Design requires a different "way of thinking". Even design that is not calling for invention or innovation per se requires that the designer think creatively. Mental patterns that have been formed by doing exercises will be helpful but will generally be inadequate to the complete task. The mind is required to think laterally, to create new possibilities based not only on a common set of similar "problems" but on a collection of experiences, observations and knowledge that have been compiled over time. The way design is taught and assessed will need to take this into account.
ABET(1996 criteria) defines it as
The objective of the design course under discussion here is to set the students on the road to independent and creative learning and thinking. The approach the instructor has taken is to expect that students have a certain maturity that will enable them to take the initiative in interpreting assignments and to allow a certain freedom in the submissions. The students have found this approach, or probably the way in which this approach has been implemented, confusing. The course is the first in a sequence of three courses that move from components to machines to systems. Thus the objectives of this course can be summarized as
That students develop The mid-year results show that the objectives have not been achieved (at least as far as the particular form of the assessment reflected these aims). The instructor is particularly concerned about the lack of development in numbers 2 and 4.
The question is why have these laudable aims not been achieved? What is it about teaching design and especially the laudable objectives of this particular course that make the outcomes so elusive? Kellogg and Vogel lament the fact that so many find excuses about why design is either tough to teach or cannot really be taught at all, but go on to argue strongly that "engineering design can be shown to be a systematic, cognitive process rather than an ad hoc endeavor. Although creativity and experience do play roles in the process, these do not preclude the possibility that engineering design can be effectively taught".
Kellogg and Vogel employ Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive development (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) as a means to examine the learning process necessary for design. They comment that engineering educators are good at getting students to the fourth level, analysis and that there should be no reason why they cannot improve at helping students to progress to the higher levels. An important comment made by Kellogg and Vogel that relates to the growing disparity in the educational and social backgrounds of students entering engineering programs is that "it is also critical to give students who learn more slowly adequate time to progress through the lower cognitive levels into more complex processing. If educators fail here, many potentially good designers may never achieve their capabilities because they have given up on themselves without understanding why".
Karuppoor et al base the statement that "engineering design is a process that can be developed and imparted to engineers" on research that has been conducted over the past decade, the results of which are reported in a number of books on the design process. The task we have is that of discovering the best way to do that for a disparate group of students some of whom have poor preparation and lack experiences of the sort that may contribute to a better grasp of the principles and process. The design process they describe "consists of certain analytical skills that are applied throughout the design process in various stages. These skills are the ability to perform abstraction, identify critical parameters and the ability to question. These form the core of the methodology and enable the designer to be effective and innovative".
These are not simple analytical skills that can be built upon the knowledge of school mathematics or even the fairly rote learning of science. They are higher-level cognitive abilities that develop with time and experience. In the context of design, competence in these abilities also relies significantly on prior knowledge
If we wish to begin to develop these abilities early on in the engineering degree we have to do so within a context with which students are familiar and confident, as well as providing sufficient support or scaffolding. We also need to recognize the efficacy of certain models of learning and that for certain types of abilities experiences such as those of apprentices are desirable. They are, however, not easy to put in place and a strategy would have to be implemented to make the best use of a resource such as graduate assistants.
I argue that if we wish to develop certain generic "design" skills in our students at an early stage, we need to do so in the context of concepts with which they are generally familiar. This may mean that the initial assignments appear trivial, but they should clarify strategies and processes that will continue to be used as the context changes and new material and more difficult challenges are presented. Learning must contain sufficient challenge while remaining within the grasp of the learner.
Kellogg and Vogel are quick to point out that "it seems illogical to spend four years emphasizing the first four levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and expect that by some magical transformation students will be able to leap to the higher levels during a one semester capstone design course at the end of their academic career. If previous courses have failed to emphasize the fundamentals and nature of design, it is impractical to expect students to be prepared to successfully execute a design solution. It is critical to encourage higher order thinking throughout the entire undergraduate curriculum". Wankat and Oreowicz also comment on this as being a problem with engineering education in that "there are few challenges at the lower levels to move the student to position 3 or 4 (of Perry’s levels of development). The challenges of multiplicity usually come in senior design classes. The lower level classes are usually taught as if everything is known. This can lead to severe stress for students in a design course where they are suddenly expected to function in a world with multiple answers".
Fleischmann uses the notion of literacy;
This reiterates the need to have a certain knowledge and experience base from which to launch an attempt at problem solving. This does not imply that students can only solve a problem if they have learned how to solve the problem – rather, it means that they have to be able to make sense of the problem posed to a degree that enables them to strike out into their next unknown frontier.
Does all this find support from psychology and educational research?
Piaget and Perry
Models of cognitive development, from a young age through to college students and older shed some light on aspects of what we are considering in this argument. Here I will draw briefly on the work of Piaget and Perry as outlined in Wankat and Oreovicz. The authors begin their review with the comment that the theories "postulate that students cannot learn if they have not reached a particular level of ‘development’" and that trying to teach material that they are (therefore) unable to learn will lead to frustration and a resort to memorization.
So again the question is what "level of development" do students have when entering the university (or their sophomore year) and just how do students get to the level at which they are ready to tackle open-ended problems without much assistance, except perhaps from a group of peers? This affects the sort of tasks that they ought to be given in the first design course that attempt to move them to higher levels of development.
The third of Piaget’s stages of development is the concrete operational stage, the one that is necessary for progressing to the formal operational stage, the ability to abstract and thereby solve "new" problems, ones that have not been seen in detail before. Concrete operational thinkers must rely more on having done something before in sufficient detail to be familiar with the parts or steps. I conjecture that the experience of faculty members in the context of the first years of an engineering course is that many students are still at the concrete operational stage, at least in the realm of the new mathematics, engineering science and design concepts to which they are being exposed. This limits their ability to move confidently into the unknown.
Wankat and Oreovicz also ask this question of how a student moves from one stage to another and the answer given by Piaget is that there are mental structures that accommodate new data if the information makes sufficient sense to be incorporated. This is in line with the more recent neuroscience findings (see for example Jensen) regarding the connections made between the networks of neurons. The mental structure of Piaget is a psychological "model" of what is happening in the brain, while the neural network is more of a neuroscience model based on anatomical knowledge and images of brain activity. Either way, the connection between the state of the mental structure and its ability to accommodate is rather fuzzy.
At present we must argue that the evidence points toward the need to build on familiar ground, as being the most efficient way of learning.
Wankat and Oreovicz add a comment at the end of their discussion on Piaget, saying (without reference) "more recent researchers have found that both specific knowledge and general problem-solving skills are required to solve problems". This matches my experience (Pearce 2000a) – if we wish students to begin to learn how to solve problems, the strategy must be taught within the context of familiar knowledge.
In a study involving novice and experienced students and their transition from didactic / reproductive beliefs to transformative beliefs about learning, Kember concludes that changing the set of beliefs is not a quick process and happens across the college years. Expecting the change to occur too quickly would frustrate students who could not keep up with the pace, but who may well make the transition effectively given time and support. The experience of the students in the particular design course under discussion here was that the majority of student found the assignments confusing. Even those who had apparently made part of the transition to a higher-level cognitive approach were confused, while those who were still in the didactic mode (honed in an inadequate school system) were completely lost. Describing measures that were taken to enhance the transition Kember finds that the "key to the transition was allowing time and providing support".
Constructivism, Vygotsky, Dewey
Strommen summarizes the constructivist concepts applied to children’s learning;
Are these notions valid and applicable to adults, students having just left school and whose way of learning is far more set than a younger child’s? The same sort of question arises from the neuroscientific research that is popular at present – if a young person has not had certain experiences early on that form the key mental structures (neural connections) on which later cognitive abilities are founded, is the plasticity of the brain such that, as long as there has been some foundation, those mental structures can continue to form when the student enters university? Indications of learning at school such that the young adult obtains a reasonable school leaving pass, could be taken to mean that the basis of those necessary mental structures do exist. We must therefore assume that it is possible to build upon whatever flimsy foundations are in place, albeit that the building may take longer as the foundations are shored up and the cracks reinforced.
I have struggled in the past to be persuaded that the language of constructivism is appropriate to the learning process in engineering. But I have come to see (yes, I too can learn) that this interpretation is highly relevant to the learning that must happen in a design sequence as well as in the traditional classroom-taught analytical courses. It is not that students are constructing new knowledge but that they are adapting knowledge to their own mental structures and experience. This may seem a bit convoluted, because in order to adapt knowledge they must have learned it and therefore constructed it in their minds, but this only illustrates that learning is not a linear one-step process.
Vygotsky introduced the notion of the ‘zone of proximal development’ of a child, which is "the distance between the actual (cognitive) development, determined with the help of independently solved tasks, and the level of the potential development of the child, determined with the help of tasks solved by the child under the guidance of adults and in cooperation with more intelligent partners" (quoted in van der Veer and Valsiner p337).
The independent development is indicative of the present ability, based on learning, experience and a sense of awareness. The development measured when working with and supported by others, more knowledgeable and experienced (more aware), is indicative of the potential the child has to grow in the future.
The question we have to ask and respond to is: can this be applied to adult learners who have had inadequate exposure at school and possibly a poor home background. In other words, the two students sitting next to each other may have performed similarly in a school leaving exam but when faced with a task in a design course, the one with the "richer" experience will perform at a level that exceeds the other; but with the support of a "mentor" the lesser experienced student may well be able to show potential far beyond current performance. The question then becomes how to create learning environments with specific experiences whereby the need for that assistance will no longer exist. That is not to deny that there will always be a zone of proximal development for most people will perform better in the supportive environment of a group working towards one goal.
Wells argues that "who a person becomes depends critically on which activity systems he or she participates in and on the support and assistance he or she receives from other members of the relevant communities in appropriating the specific values knowledge and skills that are enacted in participation". The responsibility of the instructor, tutors and even peers is to help each individual go through a process of change (change is what constitutes learning) to recreate themselves with new ways of thinking; not in our image, but with abilities that enable them to participate fully in a community of people who are called engineers.
Students will need to be assisted in developing an ability to reflect on their own learning. This is a part of learning to learn, but one that also takes time to develop.
It is precisely these kinds of abilities that we have either ignored or assumed in the past. They can no longer be left to chance. Under-prepared students entering the tertiary institution need to be assisted through directed assignments and assessment to develop the necessary metacognitive skills that will enhance their education and prepare them for lifelong learning in a rapidly changing workplace.
It appears unrealistic at the sophomore (2nd year) level to expect too mature an ability in students to deal with those fuzzy problems from the real world while also realizing the need to reflect on their own learning. This is not to say that the goal should be removed, but to recognize that the outcomes expected of a graduate engineer and those similar ones we expect of our students, take time and require nurture to develop. Too often we set work that requires higher levels of inquiry and are simply frustrated by the inability of students to respond adequately.
Designing the Learning Process through the use of the Design Process
I have observed that the faculty members in my department (including myself) make the mistake of expecting students to demonstrate a certain acceptable level of competence in "design" while we do not use the design process ourselves in the task of designing the curriculum. We expect students to learn these higher levels of cognition while we do not pay sufficient attention to the educational literature that speaks directly to these issues, or else we fall back on beliefs rather than relying on critical reflection and well-planned inquiry.
Can the design process be effectively used to design the process of learning in a design course, given what we know about the prior learning of the students and the expected developmental stages through which they go at different rates? I have to answer in the affirmative. The problem of how to teach design must, by definition, be amenable to a solution involving the design process. The difficulty of course is that we are dealing with human beings who are individuals and over whom we have no control (unlike the technology that we design). This simply adds complexity to the task and means that we have to live with some uncertainty, to reflect on our teaching and the learning occurring in the course and be willing to make changes as we go through the process of learning ourselves.
Pavelich and Knecht report on a freshman design course in which they have reverted to using projects that involve the design of (relatively simple) mechanical devices, rather than more complex real-world problems because too many students floundered in those projects – the ambiguity and breadth were too much for them. This simply underscores the principle that if you wish students to learn higher level thinking skills they should do so in a context framed by knowledge with which they are at least somewhat familiar.
Coherence and Ways of Thinking
What is clearly important in the process of learning to approach open-ended problems is the coherence of the learning activities. This coherence has different levels (Pearce 2000b) and relates to the ability to build on what was learned in the previous year, to relate the material to courses being taken concurrently, and is in contradistinction to the confusion that students may experience when "thrown in the deep end". Students interviewed were mostly of the opinion that they had been able to make sense of the other courses they had taken and were taking in parallel, but that they found it difficult to make sense of the assignments in the first half of the design course. Design is not an easy subject to ‘teach’ and great care must therefore be taken in ensuring that the process itself is not made more difficult by confusing the students.
I have been at pains to argue (eg. Pearce 2000a) that when it is apparent that students’ backgrounds have not prepared them adequately for the demands of engineering study, and the school system has failed them, what we should be focusing on are the ways of thinking that are necessary for engineering analysis and synthesis. These would include especially what may be termed visual thinking, but also include abstraction and algorithmic thinking. Wells comments that "prior to entering the activity systems in which they hope to make their careers, many young people will need to master ways of acting and thinking that are not transparently evident in the behavior of experts, but are nevertheless prerequisites for full participation". He goes on to argue that this and other opportunities for self-exploration need to happen in settings that are supportive and relatively free of serious risk.
I understand this to reinforce the need to introduce the challenging (closed- and open-ended) problems that design poses at an early stage in the engineering curriculum, but to do so in a supportive environment (with adequate scaffolding early on) that has the objective of seeing students reach their potential not in a semester or a year, but as they progress to the capstone design or individual project.
In a relatively recent report by the AAHE and other bodies, one of the learning principles is that "learning is an active search for meaning by the learner – constructing knowledge rather than passively receiving it, shaping as well as being shaped by experiences". Making sense (finding meaning) is the critical issue here. If the student cannot make sense of the assignment or the process, the confusion sown will not result in effective long-term changes in the way the student views that part of the world (of design). The onus is on the instructor to learn what material is effective in challenging the students to "transform prior knowledge and experience into new and deeper understanding".
Conclusion
I have tried to raise some aspects of a debate regarding the appropriateness of the nature of learning (and thereby, assignments) in a sophomore design course.
I have outlined different perspectives in some way supportive of the argument I make – the work of Vygotsky, Dewey, Piaget and Perry – each providing the possibility of some common understanding of the tension between the appropriate objectives of a design course and the means to attaining those objectives at the different stages of a degree program.
Learning requires challenge, but there is a tension between too much challenge and too much comfort. The road to compromise lies in the notion of scaffolding – providing guidance and support that can be slowly dismantled as the students learn and desire to be independent (autonomous) learners and actors (designers).
We cannot expect students to have already achieved (on entry) the capabilities that we set as outcomes of the early design course. On the other hand if we expect learning to happen through experience and collaboration and acknowledge that students acquire these skills at different rates, any restricted time requirements (trying to put too much into the syllabus) will result in the student focusing on the narrow requirements of the specific assessment rather than on the acquisition of the broader skills related to open-ended problem solving.
Provide challenging problems, but do so in a way that avoids confusion, is clear about the required product and flexible in terms of assessment. Encourage students through providing adequate support in the form of effective tutors.
Are there principles upon which we can rely when designing the learning activities for the desired outcomes of a sophomore design course? Yes: learning is an active process, requiring concrete and abstract engagement with the subject; learning occurs best in a cooperative setting in which students are encouraged to articulate their understanding; learning cannot happen when confusion sets in; learning builds upon current knowledge and problem solving is possible because we can abstract; learning independence and autonomy is enhanced by providing scaffolding which can be appropriately and timeously dismantled.
References
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Spring G S, & Schonberg W., "A Study of Factors Contributing to Low Retention Rates", Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, available online at: http://www.asee.org/conferences/search/00940_2001.PDF
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