Modeling in Engineering: The Role of Representational Fluency in Students' Conceptual Understanding

Abstract

Background Modeling abilities play an important role in engineering. The creation and use of representations is a central aspect of modeling, and students who are learning to model often use a variety of representations to express, test, revise, and communicate their own thinking. Consequently, model development often depends on representational fluency and the ability to translate between and within different representational forms. Purpose This study investigates the role that representations and representational fluency play in conceptual understanding during a complex modeling task related to heat transfer. Design/Method This study involved 16 teams of 3 or 4 college students in a first‐semester heat transfer course participating in a complex modeling task. The task of the student teams was to develop a model to predict the interface temperature and the sensation felt by human skin when touching a utensil made of a given material at a given temperature. Data sources included audio recordings of student teams, as well as student‐generated artifacts. Results The results show teams thinking about their model through multiple representations and through translations within and among representations. Students' early ways of thinking used a variety of interacting representations but were often unstable and involved incomplete notions of the system to be modeled. Model development involved increasing representational fluency as well as parallel and interacting progress along a variety of dimensions. Conclusions This study furthers the understanding of representational fluency in undergraduate engineering students in a heat transfer setting and how representational fluency contributes to conceptual and application understanding.

Testing Instructional Approaches in Flipped Engineering Classrooms

“…Research findings have long supported the necessity of representational fluencies across various engineering practices and shown evidence that an important element of design and problem solving in engineering involves shifting back and forth among a variety of relevant representations. 16,19,20 . Incorporating the Lesh Translational Model in design considerations has prevented students from rushing through solution processes without being thoughtful of subject-matter issues that are the goal of instructions.…”

Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Representational Competence of Circuits Analysis and Optimization: An Exploratory Study

“…Modeling in turn is the process of developing representational descriptions or models for specific purposes in specific situations 15 . This process depends on representational fluency, which is the ability to translate between and within different representations 16 . Representational fluency has been identified as a mechanism to build, describe and measure student conceptual understanding [16][17][18] .…”

“…This process depends on representational fluency, which is the ability to translate between and within different representations 16 . Representational fluency has been identified as a mechanism to build, describe and measure student conceptual understanding [16][17][18] . Other authors refer to this ability as representational transformation 17 , or representational literacy 18 as a broader category that contains representational competence as well.…”

“…Such conceptual tools may include explicit descriptive or explanatory systems functioning as models designed specifically to reveal aspects about how students interpret specific problem-solving situations. MMP employs modeleliciting activities (MEAs) as thought revealing mechanisms, 19 in which students generate solutions that demonstrate their representational competence and fluency 16 . MEAs are problem solving activities that simulate real-world situations in which students develop, construct, describe or explain different representations 16,19,20 .The implications for the use of MBR as the theoretical framework for this study relate to using MMP as: (a) a guideline for the development of the learning design focused emphasizing representational competence 16 with MEAs, and (b) a mechanism to identify and assess student representational competence, via their produced representations 18 in the MEA.…”

Using Videos to Elicit Self-Explanations of Emergent Electromagnetic Concepts

“…Similarly in engineering design representations have been shown to improve overall outcomes [6]. Students who use multiple representations in creating models perform better; the use of multiple representations has been termed "representational fluency" [7]. Such representations can be classified as concrete (handson), pictorial, symbolic (mathematical), language, and realistic (metaphors and analogies).…”