Exploring Faculty and Student Frameworks for Engineering Knowledge Using an Online Card Sorting Platform

Abstract

In this study we investigate how faculty and students think about engineering us-ing a technique new to engineering education: card sorting. In card sorting partic-ipants sort stimuli (cards) into groups, in the process revealing how they catego-rize information. Here we examine how both engineering faculty (n=23) and first-year undergraduate students (n=62) categorize engineering scenarios. We found engineering faculty sort based on cross-disciplinary engineering activities rather than engineering disciplines. This is a surprising result as our educational frameworks are based around disciplines, and yet they are not the primary way in which faculty think. First-year students, on the other hand, showed little consen-sus on how to sort the scenarios. As a part of this paper we unveil an online card sorting platform Collection and Analysis of Research Data for Sorting (CARDS). CARDS allows researchers to create card sorting tasks, distribute them to participants for remote data collection, and analyze quantitative results.

How to Assess Students’ Structure–Property Reasoning?

“…A disadvantage of the SPR-instrument is that analyzing the test results is complex and time-consuming. By using a computer applet for the test, the analysis time for teachers could be reduced significantly.…”

Who Tells Your Story? A Card-Sort Activity for Eliciting Authentic Narratives

“…Card-sort activities have been described as a tool that can lead to deeper and more authentic storytelling (Conrad & Tucker, 2019), and they have been used for the exploration of conceptual understanding (Chen et al, 2020; Conrad & Tucker, 2019; Mosyjowski, 2020). They have not been widely used to explore factors in decision-making or to lessen the impact of differences between interviewers and interviewees, however.…”

“…Card sorts have been used in several prior studies, including a study on how individuals with multiple sclerosis manage fatigue (Thy et al, 2015) and another focusing on children and adolescents with chronic conditions (Rogers et al, 2021). More closely related to our study, card sorts were used by Chen et al (2020) to explore novice and expert understanding of engineering, by Conrad and Tucker (2019) to investigate how expert and novice engineers organize engineering-related scenarios, and by Mosyjowski (2020) to explore engineering students’ perspectives on the qualities of an engineer they considered valued in their academic and professional experiences. Although their focus was on card sorting for conceptual understanding, Conrad and Tucker (2019) also described advantages for using it in in-depth interviews, including eliciting deeper reflection and recall, increasing interviewer-interviewee rapport, and providing an enjoyable hands-on experience.…”

What Is Engineering and Who Are Engineers? Student Reflections from a Sustainability-Focused Energy Course

“…(Lucy) Notably, as the students talked about engineering, they largely did so in a distant and general manner, without personal references or examples (see studies about critical discourse analysis, particularly nominalization and transitivity, e.g., [40]). The emphasis was largely on the "doing", the "fixing", the "solving", and the "building", which is indicative of a nascent understanding of what engineering is [41]. An exception is a comment that Lucy made, in which she sets her personal engineering apart from others with a passion for building things: I think some people in engineering, they strictly love to build things or put things together, like wires or a building, but also engineering could have a more broad (sic) approach, like the way I'm doing it, where you learn a certain way of thinking, and then you can go out in the world and just apply that.…”