Reflection has long been considered an important aspect of the educated practitioner. Educated practitioners utilize reflection to connect the knowledge of our fields, infuse this knowledge with meaning, and intertwine knowledge with our own personal identities. Recently the Consortium to Promote Reflection in Engineering Education (CPREE) has made considerable progress in promoting reflection across the engineering education community within the United States. The following work-in-progress study leverages our involvement, experiences and observations within CPREE to capture the value of reflection experiences through the lens of different stakeholders.
Researchers from four distinctly different institutions are currently organizing and implementing an initial assessment of engineering stakeholders, including educators, students and practitioners, to investigate what aspects of reflection are valued by these individuals and why.
This paper will present preliminary results obtained from open-ended surveying intended to guide future homogeneous and heterogeneous sets of focus groups. The results of these efforts will leverage and extend beyond the initial efforts of CPREE. The emerging findings will provide a better understanding of the barriers to overt reflective practice and of mechanisms for developing productive reflective practice. This will provide a foundation for our future work investigating change efforts at our institutions that aim to increase faculty and engineering students’ value of reflection as a professional engineering skill and their associated reflective practice within teaching, learning, and engineering work.
Dr. Kristy Csavina is a Teaching Professor and is the Assistant Department Head of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. She has her bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universi
Dr. Adam Carberry is an assistant professor at Arizona State University in the Fulton Schools of Engineering, The Polytechnic School. He earned a B.S. in Materials Science Engineering from Alfred University, and received his M.S. and Ph.D., both from Tufts University, in Chemistry and Engineering Education respectively. Dr. Carberry was previously an employee of the Tufts’ Center for Engineering Education & Outreach and manager of the Student Teacher Outreach Mentorship Program (STOMP).
Dr. Trevor S. Harding is Professor of Materials Engineering at California Polytechnic State University where he teaches courses in materials design, biopolymers, and nanocomposites. Dr. Harding has served as PI of a multiinstitutional effort to develop psychological models of the ethical decision making of engineering students and measure this decision-making within the context of both pro-social and anti-social behaviors. He is heavily involved in the ERM, Materials, and Community Engagement divisions of ASEE. He received the 2008 President’s Service Learning Award for innovations in the use of service learning at Cal Poly. In 2004 he was named a Templeton Research Fellow by the Center for Academic Integrity. Dr. Harding received both the 1999 Apprentice Faculty Grant and 2000 New Faculty Fellow Award for his contributions to engineering education.
Patrick Cunningham is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. His professional development is focused on researching and promoting metacognition, self-regulated learning, and reflection among students and faculty in E
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