Resumen de Model-eliciting activities: assessing engineering student problem solving and skill integration processes
Tuba Pinar Yildirim, Larry Shuma, Mary Besterfield Sacre
A Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA) presents student teams with a thought-revealing, model-eliciting, open-ended, realistic, client-drivenproblem for resolution. Here we extend the original MEA construct developed by mathematics education researchers to upper-levelengineering coursework and introduce an ethical component. Our extensions also require students to integrate previously learnedconcepts as they gain new understanding. We propose that MEAs offer engineering educators at least two potential benefits: improvedconceptual understanding and a means for assessing the problem solving process. However, these benefits will only accrue if the MEAsare properly implemented. Consequently, relative to the first we propose certain strategies, learned through experience, for successfulMEA implementation, recognizing that this is not a simple task. In addition, we suggest using MEAs as assessment tools and illustratehow they can help analyze students’ problem solving processes. Our findings are based on experiments conducted in different learningenvironments over a two year period at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. This paper should serve as aresource for those engineering educators and researchers interested in implementing MEAs.
