Cooperative Learning Instructional Activities in a Capstone Design Course

Abstract

In developing our capstone design course, we decided to include instruction in design methodology, project management, engineering communications, and professional ethics, along with a comprehensive design project. As this course evolved over a number of years, we found that active and cooperative learning was critical for effective instruction in these topics and we developed a series of instructional activities using this methodology. These activities consisted of short presentations (mini‐lectures) with interspersed team exercises. We describe our course, these instructional activities, and some evaluation data showing that our students found them effective and important. Our experiences convinced us that the cooperative learning approach both enhanced our students' understanding of these topics and encouraged them to incorporate the associated skills into their working skill set. Including team exercises that dealt with various steps in the design process provided a “jump‐start” on these unfamiliar activities in a structured, short duration exercise environment in class. Listening to presentations by other teams and reviewing and discussing another team's results as a part of the team exercises provided an opportunity to see and think about different formulations of the problem they just considered.

The Effectiveness of Cooperative Learning

“…Note that the high level of academic achievement typically associated with cooperative situations does not necessarily guarantee that students working within a group will outperform those who work alone. Most social scientists agree that only relatively mature and well-developed groups outperform individuals (Johnson & Johnson, 2002 (Felder & Brent, 1994, 2001Johnson & Johnson, 1978, 1989Oakley, Felder, Brent, & Elhajj, 2004;Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). This study confirms that the performance of individuals working within a team improves as the team matures.…”

“…Students in the cooperative learning condition were instructed to work together as a team to maximize the academic success of all the team members (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991). While cooperative learning has many different implementation models in the engineering education context (Felder & Brent, 2003;Mourtos, 1997;Pimmel, 2001;Terenzini, 2001), this study closely follows the well-structured model proposed by Johnson (Felder &Brent, 1994, 2001;Johnson & Johnson, 1978, 1989Oakley, Felder, Brent, & Elhajj, 2004;Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). This model states that five criteria must be satisfied for instruction to qualify as cooperative learning: positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face promotive interaction, teamwork skills, and group processing.…”

10.1.1 An Exploration of Matching Teaching to the Learning Preferences of Systems Engineering Graduate Students

“…An example of this approach is the use of project-based collaborative learning methodologies (Felder 2005, Pimmel 2001 Felder (1988) makes a distinction between student learning approaches, namely, surface, strategic, and deep approaches. In the surface approach students memorize facts but do not try to fit them into the larger context and follow routine solution procedures without trying to understand their origins and limitations.…”

Improving the Quality of Technology-Enhanced Learning for Computer Programming Courses

“…This can be achieved through cooperative educational activities, wherein students are divided into small electronic discussion groups to achieve common educational goals . [5] As the digital tools and multimedia promote individualized instruction, these can be employed to give students experience in a subjective manner on their own, with the teacher designing lessons centered on the student's individual characteristics using programmed learning such as modeling, simulation and role-playing games in extra-curricular educational activities [6]. The lessons are delivered by a qualified teacher using modern technological applications (a PowerPoint presentation, for example).…”