EFFECTS OF STUDENT-LED UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH EXPERIENCE ON LEARNING AND ATTITUDES TOWARD ENGINEERING IN AN INTRODUCTORYMATERIALS SCIENCE COURSE Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • ABSTRACTAn introductory materials science course has been traditionally taught at Texas A&M University - like at many other universities - through lectures with minimal active student involvement. With this approach, most students just reproduce what they are given and accept it without any challenge or question. The authors have redesigned this course to include an active learning component. While the course consists of lecture-based classes during regular teaching hours to keep the essence of traditional teaching, the authors incorporated a research experience to their class in order to engage students and encourage them to apply the content seen in class to real-word problems with a higher level of expertise. The aim of the study was to discover the effectiveness of the authors redesign. We hypothesized that the research experience would facilitate the learning of knowledge content and the enthusiasm for the chosen field of study, i. e. engineering. The results reveal that students in the experimental condition consistently show a greater gain in knowledge, but there is no sufficient evidence suggesting that the research experience increase the students enthusiasm to be an engineer.

published proceedings

  • 2012 ASEE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

author list (cited authors)

  • Arroyave, R., Radovic, M., & Froyd, J. E.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Arroyave, Raymundo||Radovic, Miladin||Froyd, Jefferey E

publication date

  • August 2012