Using Writing to Link Procedures and Concepts in Statics

Abstract

where she also serves as Assistant Department Head of Graduate Education and co-Director of the VT Engineering Communication Center (VTECC). She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago and an M.A. and B.A. in English from the University of Georgia. Her research interests include interdisciplinary collaboration, design education, communication studies, identity theory and reflective practice. Projects supported by the National Science Foundation include interdisciplinary pedagogy for pervasive computing design; writing across the curriculum in Statics courses; as well as a National Science Foundation CAREER award to explore the use of e-portfolios for graduate students to promote professional identity and reflective practice. Her teaching emphasizes the roles of engineers as communicators and educators, the foundations and evolution of the engineering education discipline, assessment methods, and evaluating communication in engineering.

Self‐explanation activities in statics: A knowledge‐building activity to promote conceptual change

“…Our coding scheme was constructed using (i) the coding scheme developed by Litzinger et al (2010) to characterize student explanations of statics; (ii) Li and Shavelson (2001) knowledge framework, which defined four types of knowledge for the assessment of scientific performance: declarative knowledge (e.g., definitions, terms, facts), procedural knowledge (e.g., algorithms, steps, actions), schematic knowledge (e.g., theories and mental models), and strategic knowledge (e.g., strategies and conditional knowledge); and (iii) the notions of static equilibrium (Gross & Dinehart, 2012; Herold & Stahovich, 2012; Litzinger et al, 2010; Steif et al, 2010; Steif & Dollár, 2005; Venters et al, 2013), the representation of forces in FBDs, the conditions of static equilibrium, Newton's third law, the concept of force, the concepts of sum of forces and sum of moments, the equation governing the equilibrium of two‐dimensional rigid bodies (), the sign convention, and trigonometry. These principles were integrated into the coding scheme from the pilot study using students' explanations of incomplete and incorrect examples.…”

“…The quality of a written self-explanation is often a consistent indicator of how the learning process is occurring (Schworm & Renkl, 2006). The use of writing activities promotes the acquisition of conceptual knowledge through reflection (Venters et al, 2013). Students had to write self-explanations in Steps 2, 3, and 5 from an incorrect or incomplete worked example.…”

Adventures in Paragraph Writing: The Development and Refinement of Scalable and Effective Writing Exercises for Large-enrollment Engineering Courses

“…As described in more detail below, our work builds upon recent efforts by Hanson and Williams, who applied an "explain a problem" writing component to sophomore-level statics Page 24.141.3 classes, and Venters et al, who refined and comprehensively assessed the same technique in a larger course. [6][7] While these techniques were successfully implemented in these trials, more work is needed in order to determine how to adopt and refine such techniques in a wider range of institutional settings, especially in light of varying resource climates and specifically desired learning outcomes.…”

Student Metacognitive Reflection on a Conceptual Statics Question

“…According to Rittle-Johnson et al [1], conceptual knowledge is defined as "understanding of the principles that govern a domain," while procedural skill is "the ability to execute action sequences to solve problems." This distinction is commonly discussed in mathematics education [1,2,3,4] but also in other fields, including biology [5], chemistry [6], engineering design [7], electrical engineering [8], structural engineering [9], and statics [10]. In this work, we investigate conceptual understanding in statics, a core course in undergraduate mechanical and civil engineering education that is also often taken by students in other engineering majors.…”