What is Engineering Knowledge: A Longitudinal Study of Conceptual Change and Epistemology of Engineering Students and Practitioners

Abstract

Dr. Shane Brown conducts research on cognition and conceptual change in engineering. He received his bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees from Oregon State University, both in Civil Engineering. His Ph.D. degree includes a minor in Science and Mathematics Education. His master's degree is in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Brown is a licensed professional civil engineer and has six years of experience designing water and wastewater treatment facilities in central California. He was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2011. Dr. Brown's research interests are in conceptual change, epistemology, and social or situated cognition. Specifically, his research focuses on theoretical approaches to understanding why some engineering concepts are harder to learn than others, including the role of language and context in the learning process.

Frontier: Discipline-Based Education Research to Advance Authentic Learning in Agricultural and Biological Engineering

“…Further, research has been conducted in a few disciplines to track changes in students' discipline-specific engineering epistemologies across the curriculum and to characterize the epistemologies of students, faculty, and practitioners. Notable studies have occurred in civil engineering (Brown et al, 2013;Montfort et al, 2014) and biomedical engineering (Bell-Huff et al, 2019).…”