ABET is committed to promoting the broad development of engineering students including knowledge of the social, cultural, environmental, and global implications of engineering practice. Coincident with the cultural shift within engineering education is a scholarly interest in the communications of engineers and students. The present study is situated in a graduate course in environmental engineering that incorporated lectures and activities that used art and narrative topics with the goal of making students more reflective about engineering practices. The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze two methods of machine-based formative assessment of students’ essays written in response to these lectures. The two machine tools used were i) naïve Bayes analysis and ii) Meaning Extraction Helper. The results showed that both methods were able to identify differences in student essays. We suggest several ways in which these machine methods could be extended to aid in assessing learning and reflective thinking in students.
Roman Taraban is Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. His interests are in how undergraduate students learn, and especially, in critical thinking and how students draw meaningful connections in traditional college content materials.
David Robledo is a PhD student in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, specializing in new media communications of science and engineering that benefit environment. His research draws from extensive professional experience in developing new media strategies supporting the role of artisanal economies in environmental sustainability and small-scale economic development in economically challenged zones.
Francesco Donato received his Ph.D. in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience from Texas Tech University after receiving his MFA from Parsons School of Design. His research explores how the brain processes aesthetics and the resulting impact that engaging aesthetics can have on our capacity for creative thinking. As an educator, his aspiration is to find meaningful ways to give art students a better understanding of the current state of empirical aesthetics in the belief that such an appreciation would inform and influence their studio art practice.
Having completed his Ph.D. through the University of Washington's interdisciplinary Individual Ph.D. Program (see bit.ly/uwiphd), Ryan is now a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Instructor at Texas Tech University. He currently facilitates an interdisciplinary project entitled "Developing Reflective Engineers through Artful Methods" and teaches courses in the colleges of engineering and education. His scholarly interests include both teaching and research in STEM education, with a focus on engineering education, art in engineering, social justice in engineering, care ethics in engineering, humanitarian engineering, engineering ethics, and computer modeling of electric power and renewable energy systems.
Jeong-Hee Kim is Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. Kim is a curriculum theorist, teacher educator, and narrative inquiry methodologist. Her research centers on various epistemological underpinnings of curriculum studies, particularly engaging in hermeneutical excavation of the stories of students and teachers around the notion of Bildung, a human way of developing or cultivating one’s capacity. She received the Faculty Outstanding Researcher Award in 2018 from Texas Tech University, and the Outstanding Publication Award from the American Education Research Association in 2017 for her book, Understanding Narrative Inquiry, published in 2016 with SAGE. She has published numerous articles in journals including Journal of Curriculum Studies, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Dr. Danny D. Reible is the Donovan Maddox Distinguished Engineering Chair at Texas Tech University. He was previously the Bettie Margaret Smith Chair of Environmental Health Engineering in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. Reible holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and is a Board Certified Environmental Engineer, a Professional Engineer (Louisiana), and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for the “development of widely used approaches for the management of contaminated sediments”. His research is focused on the fate, transport, and management of contaminants in the environment and the sustainable management of water resources.
Chongzheng Na is an associate professor at Texas Tech University. He graduated from Tsinghua University (B.E.), Pennsylvania State University (M.S.), and University of Michigan (Ph.D.). Before joining Texas Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor at University of Notre Dame. His research and teaching interests include developing innovative water treatment technologies and incorporating knowledge related to such efforts in the environmental engineering curriculum.
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.
