Patterns of student conceptual understanding across engineering content areas

• Autores: Devlin Montfort, Geoffrey L. Herman, Shane A. Brown, Holly M. Matusovich, Ruth A. Streveler, Olusola O. Adesope
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 31, no. 6 (Parte A), 2015, págs. 1587-1604
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Much of the existing research on engineering students’ conceptual understanding focuses on identifying difficult concepts in specificcourses and curricula. Although there are a great number of findings from which engineering educators may be able to draw, feware directly transferable from their original context and few inform instructors about how to improve learning. This paper seeks tofill the gap by investigating conceptual understanding across four engineering disciplines. Specifically, the present study seeks toanswer the following overarching research question: What are the patterns in engineering students’ conceptual understanding acrossfour engineering content areas? We used an amplified secondary qualitative data analysis to examine over 250 interviews withengineering students that were initially conducted to understand students’ conceptual understanding in different disciplines ofengineering. The engineering topics represented in the data set included mechanics of materials, transportation engineering, fluidmechanics, and digital logic. Two themes emerged from our analysis that apply to students’ understanding across four diversecontent areas within engineering: (1) students inappropriately group dissimilar phenomena, processes, or features, and (2) studentsreason using simplified causal relationships. These themes lend themselves to suggestions for instructional practice across disciplinesand for future research areas.