Exploring Civil Engineering Undergraduate and Practitioners’ Performance on Strength of Materials Concept Inventory

Preparing successful engineering undergraduate students for the workforce is imperative and requires students to apply their conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals to engineering design work. Conceptual understanding is assessed through the use of concept inventories. Learning theories may help explain differences in concept inventory performance. Expert novice theory suggests that experts understand the concepts as big ideas and would be able to solve problems where they have conceptual understanding. Situated cognition theory suggests that knowledge is contextual, and performance would hinge on the participant's familiarity with the question and the visual representations in the question. Although there is a growing body of literature analyzing students' conceptual understanding through concept inventories, few studies focus on how or if conceptual understanding transitions into engineering practice. The purpose of this study is to explore differences in conceptual understanding of strength of material concepts across engineering undergraduate students and professional civil engineers. Researchers implemented the Strengths of Material Concept Inventory, collecting data from 153 engineering undergraduate students and 119 practicing civil engineers. The statistical analysis revealed that overall structural engineers performed better than non-structural engineers and engineering undergraduate students. In addition, findings from this exploration noted that performance from all participants is low in shear stress beam questions. Results suggest that differences in performance between the groups may be due to the way concepts are situated and interpreted across academic and workplace contexts. These findings point to the need to further develop the concept inventory through a qualitative interview approach investigating conceptual understanding in practice and validating the instrument. Focused, in-depth explorations can provide researchers with additional explanations and reasonings on practicing engineers conceptual understanding while solving problems. Obtaining this information can offer tools for aligning educational practices and prepare students for the engineering workforce

Traffic Signal System Misconceptions Across Three Cohorts: Novice Students, Expert Students, and Practicing Engineers

Theories of situated knowledge and research evidence suggest that students are not prepared for the engineering workforce upon graduation from engineering programs. Concept inventory results from diverse fields suggest that students do not understand fundamental engineering, mathematics, and science concepts. These two concerns may result from different knowledge deficiencies; one from lack of conceptual understanding and the other from lack of applied knowledge. The research goals of this paper are to identify misconceptions, knowledge about phenomena that are persistent and incorrect, related to traffic signal operations and design in novice and expert engineering students and practicing engineering and to attempt to explain the patterns in misconceptions across these three cohorts. Results indicate three patterns (decreasing, increasing, and no change) of misconceptions across the three cohorts considered in this study (novice students, expert students, and practicing engineers). The pattern of decreasing misconception can be explained by a traditional model of learning that suggests improved understanding with additional instruction and student time on task. The pattern of increasing misconception appeared for concepts that were particularly complex and confounded, where practicing engineers produced much more complex answers that were mostly correct, but made leaps and speculations not yet proven in the literature. Misconception frequencies that stayed the same tended to include topics that do not have required national standards or that are buried in automated processes. The process of identifying and documenting misconceptions that exist across these cohorts is a necessary step in the development of data driven curriculum. An example of a conceptual exercise developed from four misconceptions identified in this study is also demonstrated

Conceptual Representations within the Social and Material Contexts of an Engineering Workplace and Academic Environments

Situated cognition theory emphasizes the role that social and material contexts have on learning and knowledge application. Several studies of engineering workplace environments have noted differences between the social and material contexts of the workplace and those of undergraduate engineering education. No existing research has studied the social and material contexts of both workplace and academic environments, specifically focusing on how these contexts influence conceptual representations within a single engineering discipline. Conceptual representations are the social and material contexts that mediate how concepts are represented, such as language, text, symbols, diagrams, equations, and other tools. Differences in the social and material contexts mediating conceptual representations across workplace and academic environments may be partially responsible for the engineering education-practice gap and is an underexplored topic. The purpose of this research is to explore a structural engineering workplace environment and undergraduate structural engineering courses to document conceptual representations and the social and material contexts that mediate them within both these workplace and academic environments. Ethnographic methods were used to access and explore these environments in-depth through participating in and observation of their respective social and material contexts. Findings from this exploration noted that conceptual representations in the academic environments exhibited a lesser degree of tangibility to real-world conditions, project/stakeholder constraints, and engineering tools than conceptual representations in the workplace. Furthermore, engineering tools such as codes and standards were applied in more evaluative ways in the workplace environment compared to more prescriptive applications of these tools in the academic environments. Lastly, engineering heuristics in the workplace environments were more likely to be practice-based than the heuristics used in the academic environment, which were more profession-based. These findings offer unique frameworks for characterizing conceptual representations such as: degrees of tangibility, prescriptive versus evaluative code use, and practice-based versus profession-based heuristics, which may be applicable for describing the sociomaterial nature of conceptual representations across other engineering workplace and academic environments

Engineering handbook

1998 handbook for the faculty of Engineerin

Engineering handbook

1998 handbook for the faculty of Engineerin

Characterizing the Load Environment of Ferry Landings for Washington State Ferries and the Alaska Marine Highway System

INE/AUTC 13.0

State of the Art of Structural Engineering

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the developments in structural engineering that took place during the past century. This overview includes ͑1͒ some of the major structural accomplishments as selected by the writers, ͑2͒ the advances in mechanics as the basis of structural analysis, ͑3͒ the development of new materials, ͑4͒ new fields of research and practice, and ͑5͒ the changes in the way design projects are performed. In addition, the writers' personal predictions for future developments during the 21st century are also presented. One of the main features affecting the evolution of structural engineering over the last part of the 20th century has been the advent and rapid development of digital computers as engineering tools. Computers can be used to perform complex and cumbersome computations and to enhance worldwide communications, both with great speed and reliability. This has already had an important effect on the way we design structures and educate civil engineers, but the impact on structural analysis and design as well as on construction planning and management is still in progress. We believe that this impact will be fully felt in the 21st century. Computers will liberate engineers from tedious and routine computations, allowing them to concentrate on more creative and important endeavors. They will facilitate the design of constructed facilities as complete systems rather than by considering each subsystem ͑such as structure and foundation͒ separately. They will lead finally to the needed integration of the design and construction processes

Semester Courses and Course Equivalents: Graduate Courses Summary

A list comprised of summaries of all graduate courses and course equivalents at Wright State University