Title: THE ABC'S OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION: ABET, BLOOM'S TAXONOMY, COOPERATIVE LEARNING, AND SO ON
Abstract: If you are like most university professors, you were not taught anything about how to teach in graduate school or when you began in your first faculty position. All you had to go on was how your professors taught, but nobody taught them anything about teaching either. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s our system. Teaching is too complex and too important a profession to let people do it with no training or experience. Granted, some new faculty members are excellent the first time they get in front of a class, and I hope you’re one of them, but the odds are against it. There are also a few who are poor teachers from the outset and never get better. Since you’re taking the time now to read a paper about engineering education the chances are that you’re not going to be one of those either. You are probably in the broad middle category of faculty members who have the potential to be excellent teachers but may take years learning how to do it by trial and error. Not that trialand-error learning is always a bad thing, but in the case of teaching the ones paying the penalty for the errors are not the ones making them. Trial and error is also unnecessary. A lot is known about what makes teaching effective: spending some time in the literature learning about it can knock a couple of years off your learning curve. The greatest initial barrier to learning new material is often jargon—unfamiliar terms that may denote easily learned concepts but whose unfamiliarity makes them sound esoteric and difficult. If you read ASEE conference proceedings or the Journal of Engineering Education or any other teaching-related journal, you will notice that a number of terms keep showing up, often with little or no explanation. If you don’t know what they mean, the articles in which they appear may be difficult to decipher. The purpose of this paper is to help you over this hurdle. The few terms to be defined don’t even begin to constitute an exhaustive glossary of educational jargon, but if you understand them you’ll be off to a good start. We first introduce learning styles—the different ways students characteristically use to take in and process information. Understanding what those ways are is a good first step toward designing instruction that can accommodate the learning needs of all of the students in a class. We then define three instructional approaches: active learning (getting students to do things in class that actively engage them with the material being taught), cooperative learning (putting students to work in teams under conditions that promote the development of teamwork skills while assuring individual accountability for the entire assignment), and problem-based learning and similar approaches (teaching material only after a need to know it has been established in the context of a complex question or problem, which increases the likelihood that the students will absorb and retain it).
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 162
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