Materials science and engineering is often referred to as a “discovery” major, meaning that many students do not fully appreciate the breadth of materials science, nor do they understand how it relates to their chosen field of study. Students not majoring in the field are often exposed to materials knowledge in a limited number of courses, yet are often asked to apply knowledge of materials science and engineering as they work on independent or team based projects. The team elected a constructivist learning approach to test the hypothesis that student appreciation for materials science will be enhanced when working on an independent project that is intimately related to their broader career interest. In addition, the value of different mentoring approaches (peer-peer, expert-student) to the learning outcomes of the project will be examined. The course is a 106-student course that is offered to all engineering majors, and is generally composed of students from bioengineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and is the first course for materials science and engineering students. Students were asked to select a topic related to their professional interest. A Wiki-style article was assigned that asked students to deconstruct the life cycle of the primary material associated with the topic. Students were asked to consider ore extraction, raw material processing, product manufacturing, and end-of-life of the material, with a primary focus on the materials processing-properties-structure triad. Projects will be assessed by a team of faculty and graduate students who are not responsible for the course using a cognitive domain rubric. In addition, students will be asked to complete a survey that both addresses the cognitive domain as well as the affective domain related to the connections between concepts in materials science and their professional goals. Data will be compared across groups provided different types of mentorship during the development of their project. We will report on the final data and correlations extracted from this course to address whether project-based learning aids in enhancing student appreciation for materials science and engineering and how the utilization of different mentoring types enhances the effect.
Siddha Pimputkar earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Ph.D. in Materials from University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University in 2016 as an Assistant Professor and has since been establishing a lab focused on the bulk and thin-film synthesis of single-crystal nitride materials and other electronic and optically active materials. Current material systems include cubic boron nitride, indium nitride and a variety of ternary nitride systems, including InGaN and AlInN. In addition to research, he teaches a quantum mechanics class and the introduction to material science class and enjoys exciting the next generation of students. Integrating data collection and analysis procedures to the classroom to receive quantitative feedback on the usefulness of different educational approaches is of current interest.
Greg Skutches earned both his Master’s (1997) and Ph.D. (2001) in English with a specialization in Composition and Rhetoric at Lehigh University. He joined the English Department at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania in 1999 and returned to Lehigh in 2006 to establish and direct the Writing Across the Curriculum Program and teach courses in literature and first-year writing. In the fall of 2008, he launched the Technology, Research, and Communication (TRAC) Writing Fellows Program, which has grown into an organization of 85 discipline-based peer writing tutors who, in total, work with more than 1,300 students at Lehigh each semester. His research interests include topics in writing across the curriculum, composition theory, argument theory, and peer learning with a special focus on writing fellows programs.
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.
