EarthComm is a comprehensive, project-based, secondary-level Earth and Space science program. It includes student learning materials, teacher resources, teacher-support networks, and assessment tools. EarthComm also features a robust Web site filled with student and teacher resources regularly updated by AGI.
The Science and Engineering of Materials (Activate Learning with these NEW titles from Engineering!)
Mark Carpenter is an Education Specialist at the American Geological Institute. After receiving a B.S. in Geology from Exeter University, England, he undertook a graduate degree at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier, Canada, where he began designing geology investigations for undergraduate students and worked as an instructor. He has worked in basin hydrology in Ontario, Canada, and studied mountain geology in the Pakistan and Nepal Himalayas. As a designer of learning materials for AGI, he has made educational films to support teachers and is actively engaged in designing inquiry-based activities in Earth system science for students of various ages.
Our Active learning techniques page offers a range of ideas that instructors can adopt whether they are just starting out with active learning or are looking for new strategies. Instructors across Cornell (from the humanities to STEM) are using these techniques, which can be adapted to almost any course.
High school students interested in studying materials engineering should take classes in math, such as algebra, trigonometry, and calculus; science, such as biology, chemistry, and physics; and computer programming.
Analytical skills. Materials engineers often work on projects related to other fields of engineering. They must determine how materials will be used and how they must be structured to withstand different conditions.
Speaking skills. While working with technicians, technologists, and other engineers, materials engineers must state concepts and directions clearly. When speaking with managers, these engineers must also communicate engineering concepts to people who may not have an engineering background.
We are working on back-filling our collection of books with critical works for engineering students and faculty, while also developing the collection around specific faculty interests as diverse as tissue engineering, engineering education, and the history of engineering. A particular focus going forward for our book collection will be social justice, ethics, and design. Interested in any of these? Allow us to recommend a few titles:
ProQuest SciTech Premium Collection: This collection offers a number of science, technology, materials sciences, and engineering resources. The entire collection is full-text, and includes scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, magazines, technical reports, conference proceedings, government publications, etc.
Currently, SCALE-UP is being used in every computer science and engineering class students take in their first two years. It is also being experimented with in some history, anthropology and other non-engineering courses.
Materials science and engineering is the basis for all engineering. Improvements in the quality of life require knowledge of the processing and properties of current materials and the design, development and application of new materials. The Materials Science and Engineering (MatSE) curriculum provides an understanding of the underlying principles of synthesis and processing of materials and of the interrelationships between structure, properties, and processing. Students learn how to create advanced materials and systems required, e.g., for flexible electronic displays and photonics that will change communications technologies, for site specific drug delivery, for self-healing materials, for enabling the transition to a hydrogen-based economy, and for more efficient photovoltaics and nuclear systems for energy production. The curriculum uses concepts from both basic physics and chemistry and provides a detailed knowledge of what makes the materials we use every day behave as they do.
Students in the first two years take courses in general areas of science and engineering as well as courses introducing the concepts in MatSE. In the third year, students study the common, central issues related to MatSE. In the senior year, students focus on an area of MatSE of their greatest interest, providing them with the detailed knowledge to be immediately useful to corporations, become entrepreneurs, or to provide the underpinning knowledge for graduate study. Note: students interested in biomaterials take a specific set of courses to provide them with a background in biology and chemistry while maintaining a strong engineering focus.
We are a community of researchers, many with experience and backgrounds in both materials science and chemical engineering, striving to equip our graduates with a broad educational foundation, critical knowledge, and and skills from which to launch their careers. We produce engineers and scientists with the capacity to make a difference in increasingly vital areas such as sustainability issues related to our finite materials resources and the impact of materials utilization and disposal on the environment.
Active learning has been increasingly considered in academic settings within a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate curricula. In previous studies, researchers reported significant improvements in students' examination, performance, and educational achievements in active learning classrooms as compared to those using a passive learning approach [1,2]. In biomedical engineering (BME), an inherently multidisciplinary field [3], active learning can be incorporated through various pedagogical innovations and within unlimited platforms. In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, problem- and project-based learning are among the most suitable techniques that can be easily implemented within new or existing course syllabi [4]. Such approaches increase students' engagement and enthusiasm, leading to a deeper and more efficient retention of new concepts. While examination performance can serve as an easily available metric to analyze the effectiveness of problem- and project-based learning techniques, confounded factors such as stress and anxiety can impede unbiased conclusions. Hence, additional measures recorded throughout an entire semester can provide valuable data for qualitative and quantitative investigation of active learning techniques and their effectiveness on students' academic performance and overall success.
The interactive term TIME*GENDER was not found to be statistically significant for any of the survey questions, indicating that the effect of the project-based active learning technique from preactivity to postactivity was not significantly different between female and male students. Nevertheless, post hoc pairwise comparisons revealed a significant improvement only among the male students in one's clear vision of the application of programming concepts in engineering and BME careers (Questions 1 and 3). In preactivity results, the average scores for these measures were rather higher in female students as compared to male students; however, the postactivity average scores for female students were below those of the male students (Fig. 1).
This study has limitations that should be considered when interpreting the results. First, the survey instrument used in this study was partly designed ad hoc and partly adapted from a previously validated questionnaire. Our ad hoc survey questions were specifically designed to investigate students' self-efficacy and expectations of success within the course objectives and future careers, as well as their perspectives on the necessity of computer programming instruction in engineering training. These measures provide valuable information for educators and will enable them to adjust course materials and curriculum development in order to enhance the students' learning experience. Although a Cronbach's alpha of 0.862 indicated a high internal consistency within our ad hoc survey questions, adaptation of a validated career-oriented self-efficacy instrument and careful consideration of theoretical models such as expectancy-value theory [29,30] and social cognitive career theory (SCCT) [31] in designing ad hoc surveys for future studies will enable a more accurate and systematic evaluation of students' self-efficacy.
Research has shown that active learning promotes student learning and increases retention rates of STEM undergraduates. Yet, instructors are reluctant to change their teaching approaches for several reasons, including a fear of student resistance to active learning. This paper addresses this issue by building on our prior work which demonstrates that certain instructor strategies can positively influence student responses to active learning. We present an analysis of interview data from 17 engineering professors across the USA about the ways they use strategies to reduce student resistance to active learning in their undergraduate engineering courses.
Building on these prior findings, the present work seeks to examine how engineering instructors employ explanation and facilitation strategies by qualitatively analyzing instructor interviews associated with the courses discussed in the studies above. More specifically, this paper investigates the following research questions:
Employing both convenience and purposive sampling, we posted email solicitations on relevant listservs to recruit engineering instructors who self-identified as frequent practitioners of active learning. Although self-selected, most, if not all, of the participant instructors seemed to indicate in their interviews that they had prior experiences using active learning teaching methods. The sample of experienced and confident engineering instructors provided opportunities to examine their rationale and implementation of continued active learning instruction. Instructors also agreed to administer the StRIP survey to their students at three times during the term, to complete the instructor version of the StRIP instrument at the beginning and end of the term and to participate in an end-of-term instructor interview. We conducted interviews in the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 semesters. We were able to gather complete interview data from 17 of the original 18 instructors. These 17 interviews comprised the raw data for the present study. 2ff7e9595c
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