Because university engineering education in Taiwan has overly emphasized on basic knowledge and routine skills, a call for improvement has been launched. In a technology university in Taiwan, a curricular renewal responded to this request by transforming three sequential courses in the division of System Engineering in Electronic Engineering. Namely, they are beginner-level “Control System and Lab”, intermediate-level “Dynamic Control System”, and advanced-level “Embedded Operating Systems.” Subsequently, between 2013 and 2016, a pioneer curriculum transformation program was implemented. The three EE teachers responsible for these courses attended monthly self-improvement meetings over three years to co-construct open courseware and project-based learning for the promotion of students’ learning motivation and creative thinking, while a group of educational psychology scholars (ED-Psy team) supported the curriculum renewal, pedagogical upgrade, and outcome evaluation. The critical features of these renewed courses included significant project-based experiences where collaborative creative thinking, creative product design, and student autonomy were particularly facilitated.
This study concerns (1) the quality of the learning experience in the renewed courses and (2) the creativity level of students’ PBL products. First, to reveal the students’ learning experiences, we recruited 271 participants to make a comparison between SE students (n = 40) from three courses and non-SE students (n = 231). The ED-Psy team decided to adopt three evaluation methods for examining to what degree the goals (autonomy and creativity) were being achieved, which included a self-report investigation (Day Reconstruction Method, DRM), a person-centered analysis (Latent Profile Analysis, LPA), and product assessment by an expert panel (Consensual Assessment Technique, CAT). The DRM collected repeated data to measure activity-specific experiences of the preceding day, for all activities that occurred in that day.
Second, the creativity levels of project products were evaluated using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) by 10 SE experts. The scoring rubric included seven items on a ten-point scale to evaluate the products’ originality, professional quality, and elaboration. The results showed that most products were good in the dimension of professional quality and lower in dimensions of creativity (originality and elaboration). The students’ products, which were designed in the course “Embedded Operating Systems”, were evaluated as being the highest in the level of creativity.
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.
