By Phillip C. Wankat, Ph.D.

This article is a short excerpt from one published in the January-June, 2002, issue of Journal of SMET Education. www.jsmet.org Phillip C. Wankat is the Clifton L. Lovell Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and head of interdisciplinary engineering studies at Purdue University. He is co-author of the textbook Teaching Engineering (now available free through https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr and author of The Effective, Efficient Professor: Teaching, Scholarship, and Service (Allyn & Bacon). This excerpt is reprinted by permission of Professor Wankat and the editor of the Journal of SMET Education. The full article conveys important information that our limited space cannot accommodate. We encourage our readers to read Professor Wankat's complete article, available through college libraries and the journal's Web site.

Ideally, engineering and technology education would be built on a foundation of principles based on how people learn. However, most professors are not aware of the scientific knowledge base and design their courses on a "seat of the pants" feeling for what improves learning.

Researchers have been slowly unraveling the mystery of how people learn. The best source for non-experts on the current state of these scientific developments is the National Academy Press book, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (HPL, Bransford, 2000).

Student Preconceptions Affect Learning
The key learning principle is that "people construct new knowledge and understanding based on what they already know and believe." Thus, students' preconceptions are very important for learning. If the preconceptions are correct or close to correct, they can be very helpful in learning. Incorrect preconceptions can obstruct learning. There are a number of ways that professors can determine what the students' preconceptions are:
· Reflect on the mistakes the students made in the past to determine likely preconceptions.
· Give the students a pretest with questions that can be answered without resorting to calculations. Then ask students who get the answer wrong to explain their answers.

Help Students Build a Knowledge Structure
Building a knowledge structure is an active process requiring a number of steps.
· First, students need to be motivated to spend the time and energy necessary to build or rebuild a knowledge structure.
· Second, students need to learn correct facts. If the facts don't fit into the students' current knowledge structures, the easiest things to do are to discard the facts, memorize the facts as unconnected items, or change the facts so they fit the knowledge structure. For many students facts must be very compelling to induce them to change their knowledge structures. The most compelling facts are those that are obtained from direct experience. That is why beginning physics classes often use frictionless air tables to provide data and experience.
· After the facts have been learned, students need to organize these facts using a conceptual framework. An organizing lecture can be helpful at this point, but only after the students have grappled with facts that require them to rethink their knowledge structures.

Make Learning Easier
Although professors cannot learn for their students, they can structure their courses to make learning easier. After identifying student preconceptions, giving the students an opportunity to grapple with real data, and delivering an organizing lecture, the students need deliberate practice that includes feedback on performance and a chance to revise. Deliberate practice involves doing one skill at a time followed by immediate feedback and revision of that one skill.

For example, if students were learning problem solving skills, they would:
· First be exposed to one of the models for problem solving
· Then be given a problem to work through one step at a time
· After each step, they would receive feedback and be told how to revise their responses before going to the next step.

Students also need assignments to work on outside of class, and they need to be strongly encouraged to revise their assignments based on feedback-meaning assignments must be handed in and graded. Revisions should require students to think about and apply the corrections. If a student makes the same error throughout a paper, correct the first couple of errors and require the student to find and correct the remaining ones.

Learning metacognitive skills also helps students to learn. Ask students to explain orally or in writing why they are doing a procedure, have them self-assess their progress and their answers, and require them to reflect on their learning procedures.

Make Learning Transfer and Memory Strategies an Early Habit
Transfer is applying content learned in one area to help learn knowledge and application skills faster in a new area. Because technology is changing very rapidly, an engineering or technology education cannot teach students everything they need to know for a 40-year career. Graduates must become proficient at transferring content. Teachers can improve transfer by:
· Making sure that students clearly understand the material
· Showing the potential for transfer by mentioning other applications of the knowledge, using multiple contexts for example, and doing what-if problems.
· Providing explicit coaching. Ask students, "What have you studied that looks like this?"

Teacher can help students improve their memory skills by coaching them in strategies experts use to memorize content.
· Experts cluster or "chunk" items by finding significant patterns.
· The trick is to help students recognize patterns. Start by coaching. Explicitly show them patterns. Then have them practice and move on to finding patterns on their own.
· Example: The 12-digit number 189819411812 is too long to hold in short term memory (since people have the ability to store 7 +/- 2 items). However, if one recognizes the pattern that the digits are formed into years-1898; 1941; 1812-then it is easy to remember three years (particularly since they are years the United States went to war).

Keeping Students Motivated
The majority of engineering and technology students are very intelligent. The secret ingredient that separates one from another is motivation. There are many motivation techniques that professors can use in class.
· Since sharing and contributing to a group are motivating, working in cooperative small teams will motivate many students.
· Make sure that students are aware of how the material they are learning is used-this is particularly motivating to engineering and technology students.
· Challenges and deadlines from outside groups are motivating. Bring in case studies and outside experts, also.
· Make sure that almost everyone can be successful at the start of each new section. The initial use of impossibly difficult problems to "challenge the smart students" can backfire by demotivating almost everyone else.

Who Has Time?
To find time for such active teaching strategies, control content tyranny, which occurs when you let the need to cover content control the teaching and learning processes in the course. Preserve class time by delegating some of the learning responsibility to the student. Require the students to learn some of the material on their own, through textbooks, Web sites, or handouts or a Web page you prepare on your own. Other proven approaches:
· Longer class periods, during which the students work on problems in groups. These provide time for deliberate practice and allow for immediate feedback.
· On-line tutorials can also provide practice and quick feedback.

Doing It Ourselves
Ideally, graduate students who wanted to teach would all serve as teaching assistants, take a course in pedagogy, and have a supervised teaching internship. Since this rarely happens, new professors need to supplement their educations. Some ways to do this:
· Take one of the excellent workshops offered in the engineering education community, such as the National Effective Teaching Workshop held annually by the American Society for Engineering Education.
· Talk to experienced professors about both general and content-specific pedagogy. Take a risk: Invite an experienced colleague to sit in on your class and provide feedback.
· Read journals such as Prism, Journal of Engineering Education, and Journal of SMET Education.
· Experiment and practice. Obtain feedback from students, colleagues, and teaching development experts. Reflect on what worked and what didn't. Revise your methods and try again.

Remember Learning to Learn?
One of the best ways to maintain rapport with students is to become a student again. The experience reminds professors what it is like not to know and to struggle to learn. A little humiliation will not hurt most professors' teaching. The topic you study is not critical, and there are advantages to learning outside your discipline. This is closer to the experience of your students, it can be an effective antidote to boredom, and you are more likely to observe the teacher using methods not modeled in your own field.

However we do it, teaching improvement can and should continue throughout every instructor's career.

Resources
Besides How People Learn and www.jsmet.org, see:
· Johnson, D.W., et al., Cooperative Learning: Increasing College Faculty Instructional Productivity. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 4. Washington, D.C.: Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, 1991.
· Johnson, D.W., et al, "Cooperative Learning Returns to College: What Evidence Is There that It Works?" Change, 30 (4), pp. 27-35, 1998.
· McKeachie, W.J., Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research and Theory for College and University Teachers, 10th edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
· U. S. Department of Education, What Works: Research About Teaching and Learning. Washington, D.C., 1986.
· Wankat, P.C., The Effective, Efficient Professor: Teaching, Scholarship and Service. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002.