An Embodied Cognition Approach To Collaborative Engineering Design Activities

Higher educational institutions have broadly adopted Collaborative Engineering Design (CED) activities to prepare students for complex problem-solving in multidisciplinary settings. These activities are non-linear and mediated by various social practices and tools. Therefore educators might struggle in facilitating the achievement of specific learning goals. Embodied cognition is an approach that explains non-linear behaviour through orgamism-environment interactions and might therefore provide educators with insights on how to prompt students towards desired actions in CED activities. According to embodied cognition, we learn through actions that emerge as a response to a problem (task) and environmental constraints. Educators can guide students’ behaviour by proposing tasks and adapting the environmental constraints of a learning situation, thus creating a field of promoted action. In this paper, we outline the progress of a design-based research in which insights from embodied cognition are implemented to promote desired student behaviour in CED activities. We report on the results of our problem-exploration phase. A systematic literature review and focus groups with students revealed that students are often hesitant to adopt new practices and tools that could potentially improve their collaborative design process. Next, we propose three theory-based design principles in which the task and environmental constraints are leveraged to foster the adoption of practices and tools and apply them to CED activities. Finally, we will share preliminary observations of the learning processes triggered by the designed activities and outline the directions for future research

IS “DIGITAL EDUCATION” THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD? – OR IS, MAYBE, POSTDIGITAL EDUCATION WHAT IS NEEDED!

The use of “digital tools” have usually played an important role in the transformation to “emergency remote teaching” during the pandemic. However, even before the pandemic there has been a strong pressure that education should become more “digital”. Nevertheless, we see several problems associated with the present discourse related to “digitalisation” of education. 1) It often unclear what is meant with “digital education”, 2) very narrow view of “digital tools” too mainly be tools for information and communication neglecting other uses of digital technology, 3) unbalanced focus on “digital tools” there other tools are either neglected or seen as inherently inferior and “old-fashioned”, 4) conflation between “digital” and “distance”, 5) adherence to either a technological determinism or a pedagogical determinism (technology is a neutral tool). Engineering students’ courses of action have been videorecorded in design projects and in electronics labs at two universities. It can bee seen that students’ use a wealth of bodily-material resources that are an integral and seamless part of students’ interactions. They use bodily resources, concrete materials, “low-tech” inscriptions as well as “high-tech” (“digital”) inscription devices. Our results challenge that by hand – by computer and analogue tools – digital tools should be seen as dichotomies. Our empirical evidence suggests that students should be trained to not only be trained to work with “digital” tools but with a multitude of tools and resources. We, thus, advocate that a postdigital perspective should be taken in education where the digital makes up part of an integrated totality

Engineering Students’ Dynamic And Fluid Group Practices In A Collaborative Design Project

There is a growing interest in engineering education that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. Collaboration and collaborative learning imply a shared activity, a shared purpose, a joint problem-solving space, and mutual interdependence to achieve intended learning outcomes. The focus, in this study, is 1 Corresponding Author J Bernhard [email protected] on engineering students’ collaborative group practices. The context is a design project in the fifth semester of the problem-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. Students’ collaborative work in the preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. In our earlier studies video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis have been used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task on a momentmoment basis. In this paper we report from a one-hour period where a group of four engineering students do final designs in preparation for the status seminar. Using recorded multi-perspective videos, we have analysed students’ fine-grained patterns of social interaction within this group. We found that the interaction and collaboration was very dynamic and fluid. It was observed that students seamlessly switched from working individually to working collaboratively. In collaborative work students frequently changed constellations and would not only work as a whole group, but also would break into subgroups of two or three students to do some work. Our results point to the need to investigate group practices and individual and collaborative learning in design project groups and other collaborative learning environments in more detail and the results challenge a naïve individualcollaborative-binary

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Using Enquiry-and-Design-Based Learning to Spur Epistemological and Identity Development of Engineering Students

This Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Education focuses on using enquiry-based design projects to spur engineering students’ development, so as to increase understanding and application of the relevant theories, foster higher rates of student development and achieve this in healthy and productive ways

Practical Epistemic Cognition in a Design Project - Engineering Students Developing Epistemic Fluency

Contribution: This paper reports engineering students' practical epistemic cognition by studying their interactional work in situ. Studying "epistemologies in action'' the study breaks away from mainstream approaches that describe this in terms of beliefs or of stage theories. Background: In epistemology, knowledge is traditionally seen as "justified true belief'', neglecting knowledge related to action. Interest has increased in studying the epistemologies people use in situated action, and their development of epistemic fluency. How appropriate such approaches are in engineering and design education need further investigation. Research Questions: 1) How do students in the context of a design project use epistemic tools in their interactional work? and 2) What are the implications of the findings in terms of how students' cognitive and epistemological development could be conceptualized? Methodology: A collaborative group of six students were video recorded on the 14th day of a fifth-semester design project, as they were preparing for a formal critique session. The entire, almost 6 h, session was recorded by four video cameras mounted in the design studio, with an additional fifth body-mounted camera. The video data collected was analyzed using video ethnographic, conversation analysis, and embodied interaction analysis methods. Findings: The results show that the students use a wealth of bodily material resources as an integral and seamless part of their interactions as epistemic tools, in their joint production of understanding and imagining. The analysis also suggests that students' epistemological and cognitive development, individually and as a group, should be understood in terms of developing "epistemic fluency.''

Doing STEM : students’ participation and experiences in argument-driven engineering

Recent trends in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education have shifted the focus of education onto practice-based learning. Specifically, A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council [NRC], 2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) encourage opportunities for students to engage in science and engineering practices (SEPs) with the goal of more meaningful participation and engagement in authentic STEM experiences for all students. Importantly, this includes the integration of engineering into K–12 science education to increase equitable access to engineering (Committee on Integrated STEM Education, National Academy of Engineering [NAE], & NRC, 2014), especially for students from historically excluded groups such as girls and students of color (Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development, 2000; Geisinger & Raj Raman, 2013). This dissertation consists of three studies that explore the engagement and experiences of middle school students as they participate in Argument-Driven Engineering (ADE; Baze et al., 2018; Hutner et al., 2019), an instructional framework for integrating engineering into science curricula, with a focus on feminism and the unique experiences of girls. The first two studies are qualitative explorations into the epistemic criteria that student groups use when designing solutions to problems and student groups’ enactment of epistemic agency. My findings between these studies suggest that students take up meaningful roles for building knowledge and designing solutions and possess nascent epistemic abilities, and that equitable participation and shared epistemic agency was guided by the intentional effort of girls. The third study is a mixed-methods analysis of students’ engineering identities over a school year and the salient experiences which influence engineering identity. My findings suggest that authentic engineering experiences positively affect engineering identity but increasing the engineering experiences students have in school is not enough to close the gendered identity gap. Together, this work has implications around the implementation of ADE and other integrated STEM instruction, in particular, that engineering instruction should explicitly address real-world issues of social and environmental justice in order to support the engineering work of all students (e.g., Godwin & Potvin, 2015; NAE, 2008).Curriculum and Instructio

Juggling institutional and social demands : a conversation analysis of engineering students’ interactions in self-managed problem-based learning

There has been an increase in the use of problem-based learning (PBL) - a student-centred approach involving authentic problem cases and collaboration - within the engineering disciplines in response to the demands of 21st century industry. The vast majority of PBL research over the years, however, has either focused on determining its effectiveness, or reported on staff and students’ perceptions about the approach. Much less attention has been given to the group practices that lie at the heart of PBL. Ironically, then, as a pedagogical approach that is so dependent on social interaction, we know very little about its interactional elements - about how it actually works. With the aim of opening this interactional ‘black box’, this study analysed almost 100 hours of naturalistic video-recordings involving seven groups of engineering students undertaking PBL at a UK university. This thesis reports on the findings of the floating facilitator PBL model, in which learning is effectively tutorless, with only intermittent tutor contact. Conversation analysis was used to examine students’ actual social interactions in this learning setting; to finely unpack the conversational mechanics behind PBL that have long been overlooked. Although the student-centredness of PBL made the educational experience less formal in nature, this democratisation of institutional structures also allowed ‘outside’ social norms to percolate through. Added to the absence of the tutor, PBL thus made matters more complicated for students, forcing them to balance wider social values with their newfound institutional responsibilities (i.e. to self-manage their group work). Ironically, the groups co constructed themselves as being largely detached from academia; as ‘playing it cool’ in blending in as (‘non-academic’) equals. At the same time, however, with no guiding tutor, the students also oriented to their collective need to ‘do education’. In managing this dilemma - and in an apparent resistance against being substituted for the absent tutor - they treated the workload as a collective burden to be eradicated, neutralised all displays of authority, and made use of subtle interactional strategies in self-managing the likes of knowledge disagreements and social loafing. Such findings show that students do not always engage with (tutorless) PBL as intended, and provide a case for the continued naturalistic study of such conversational intricacies.There has been an increase in the use of problem-based learning (PBL) - a student-centred approach involving authentic problem cases and collaboration - within the engineering disciplines in response to the demands of 21st century industry. The vast majority of PBL research over the years, however, has either focused on determining its effectiveness, or reported on staff and students’ perceptions about the approach. Much less attention has been given to the group practices that lie at the heart of PBL. Ironically, then, as a pedagogical approach that is so dependent on social interaction, we know very little about its interactional elements - about how it actually works. With the aim of opening this interactional ‘black box’, this study analysed almost 100 hours of naturalistic video-recordings involving seven groups of engineering students undertaking PBL at a UK university. This thesis reports on the findings of the floating facilitator PBL model, in which learning is effectively tutorless, with only intermittent tutor contact. Conversation analysis was used to examine students’ actual social interactions in this learning setting; to finely unpack the conversational mechanics behind PBL that have long been overlooked. Although the student-centredness of PBL made the educational experience less formal in nature, this democratisation of institutional structures also allowed ‘outside’ social norms to percolate through. Added to the absence of the tutor, PBL thus made matters more complicated for students, forcing them to balance wider social values with their newfound institutional responsibilities (i.e. to self-manage their group work). Ironically, the groups co constructed themselves as being largely detached from academia; as ‘playing it cool’ in blending in as (‘non-academic’) equals. At the same time, however, with no guiding tutor, the students also oriented to their collective need to ‘do education’. In managing this dilemma - and in an apparent resistance against being substituted for the absent tutor - they treated the workload as a collective burden to be eradicated, neutralised all displays of authority, and made use of subtle interactional strategies in self-managing the likes of knowledge disagreements and social loafing. Such findings show that students do not always engage with (tutorless) PBL as intended, and provide a case for the continued naturalistic study of such conversational intricacies