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Challenge and Engineering Students

Challenge and Engineering Students. Deborah A. Trytten Sooner Engineering Education Center Research Institute for STEM Education School of Computer Science. Research Context.

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Challenge and Engineering Students

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  1. Challenge and Engineering Students Deborah A. Trytten Sooner Engineering Education Center Research Institute for STEM Education School of Computer Science

  2. Research Context This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation’s Gender in Science and Engineering (NSF GSE) program under Grant No. 0225228. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. • Semi-structured interviews with 186 engineering students at 4 institutions including OU • Questions asked: • What is your (least) favorite class? • Do you prefer easy classes or hard classes? • Students also described experiences in the context of answering other questions

  3. Categorization: Easy Courses • Easy courses that were disliked (11%) • Instructor wasted time by not teaching them what they needed to learn • Easy courses that were liked (13%) • Students were interested in the topic and felt they learned a lot even though they didn’t put forth much effort • Hard courses that were disliked (22%) • Students felt overwhelmed by course content • Hard courses that were liked (52%) • Students reported learning more from these courses

  4. Hard Courses Students Like • P: [I prefer] a hard class. . . . Because I feel a challenge and I feel like I actually learn something because when it is easy it is easier to forget. Whereas when it is hard I remember the concepts a lot longer. • (sophomore, female, OU, CS)

  5. Hard Courses Students Like • P: Actually I prefer a hard class. It’s nice to have that challenge and it’s a great feeling when you’re done and you feel like you’ve kind of really overcome something. Wow! Looking back at it, it was really hard but look how much I’ve learned. • (senior, female, OU, XE)

  6. Hard Courses Students Dislike • P: . . . I didn’t feel like there was [a] way to do it. I like a challenge but I like to be able to see that it’s possible. I couldn’t see, I had no idea, I would hit the wall, I had no one to call orask, no idea how to get started, I couldn’t go to the book because the book wasn’t anything like what we were doing. I couldn’t look it up online, because that wasn’t what we were doing. I had no resources to go to . . . I got pretty discouraged . . . • (senior, OU, ECE)

  7. Kukla’s Curve Increasing Effort Increasing Difficulty

  8. Pedagogical Challenge Increasing Effort Increasing Difficulty

  9. Ideas • Pick the level of difficulty carefully • Consider the full range of students in your class • Recognize when you’ve hit the drop off on Kukla’s curve • Key feature: student inactivity • Provide scaffolding to decrease difficulty until activity is seen • Example: Have part of the assignment due and hand out a solution • Spend class time working through a challenging part of the assignment

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