Requiring students to solve homework problems outside of the classroom, either by themselves or in groups, is a common practice used by engineering instructors to reinforce concepts that they have covered in lectures. Learning concepts requires knowledge, comprehension, and application, which are lower-order thinking skills in Bloom's taxonomy of intellectual development. Learning problem solving requires analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, which are higher-order thinking skills in the same taxonomy.
Deep learning of both the concepts and problem solving methodologies is necessary not only “to truly know” but to overcome misconceptions that students might have. Personal (i.e., one-on-one) instruction has the greatest potential to foster deep learning. In personal instruction, an instructor coaches a student as that student is solving a problem by providing guidance, asking questions, and having the student do just-in-time learning on unfamiliar concepts. This mode of instruction is often used to supervise a research student, but it is not practical for required engineering courses because of the student numbers. However, designing one's instructional activities to move the learning of lower-order thinking skills outside the classroom and to coach higher-order thinking skills inside the classroom has the potential to foster deeper learning, whether one is using traditional or active learning techniques. Requiring individual accountability for students' responsibility on the outside learning, an instructor can use some or all of the lecture time to coach students, and thus move towards a personal instruction model.
An interactive web-based application is under development in the Chemical Engineering Department at Bucknell University to support the learning of any problem solving methodology by engineering students. It is called eLEAPS, electronic Learning Engineering And Problem Solving. This application tool acts as a surrogate coach to help guide a student through solving a problem, based on a script provided by the instructor. In addition, the instructor can provide a concepts map, a set of web links to important concepts that a student can use to do just-in-time learning as he or she is progressing through the problem-solving script.
eLEAPS is a database-driven web application that is designed to be independent of the engineering discipline and the instructor. It has three web interfaces—administrator, faculty instructor, and student—where each type of user must login to the application tool. The administrator registers new faculty instructors and conducts maintenance on the system. The instructor defines course sections and their student enrollments and creates problem sessions to be taken by the students enrolled in the course sections. An instructor builds problem sessions using problem scripts from her/his problem library and concepts maps from his/her concepts library in the eLEAPS tool. The instructor can also generate session reports to view statistics gathered about each student's progress while doing a problem. The student interface displays active problem sessions and allows the student to work through a problem as scripted by the instructor. The instructor controls when and over what time period a problem session is to be done by students in a course section.
How does an instructor create a problem script? To begin, the instructor picks or designs the problem and generates its documented solution, either manually or electronically. A solution format might have a problem statement, a conceptual model (labeled diagram), a mathematical model (equations needed to solve the problem), a mathematical algorithm (a plan on how to solve the equations), a numerical solution, and heuristic observations (reflections on correctness and on variations to the problem). After creating a documented solution, the instructor would convert it to Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf), a universal file format.
Next, the instructor creates the problem script in her/his problem library of eLEAPS. The script identifies a concepts map that is selected from the instructor's concepts library and then defines a series of frames that would work the student through the problem solving process using portions of the “pdf” file. The general format for a frame is:
1. A web link to a “pdf” file. 2. Background Information (explanatory text that may have embedded web links). 3. A Concept Name and Its associated Question. 4. Selectable Responses for the Question (single or multiple answers). 5. For each Selectable Response, its correctness (right or wrong) and its text explanation that may have embedded web links.
The web links in Items 2 and 5 can be web pages, Word files, Excel files, simulation files, etc.
Within a frame, Items 2, 3, 4, and 5 can be repeated multiple times. Item 1 is created by extracting pages from the complete “pdf” solution and editing them using the Adobe Acrobat Professional software. Acrobat editing operations might include blanking out portions of a page, insert web link tags, and adding optional text and drawings. Each question is crafted by the instructor to address one or more concepts and to test the student's level of understanding. The explanations for each response could also be used to address misconceptions students might have.
eLEAPS provides the framework to do surrogate coaching and just-in-time learning, while giving the instructor the complete freedom to design the problem scripts and concepts maps. Because eLEAPS also collects statistics and generates reports on problem sessions, the instructor can gauge the progress of students and decide what lower-order and higher-order thinking skills need to be addressed in the next lecture class.
The eLEAPS software is a prototype design based on using a web browser, the “pdf” file format, and a database to store information about and for the users. It is an instructional tool that is being developed and will be verified as a “proof of concept” for a masters thesis. Two levels of verification will be done—one on its interface design and one on its instructional effectiveness. Feedback surveys will be used to address the instructors' and students' preferences for the content and functionality of the interfaces. A pre- and post-survey on the subject matter will be used to assess eLEAPS effectiveness to help promote lower-order thinking skills. Exams scores over the past five years in an introductory chemical engineering course will be used to draw preliminary conclusions on eLEAPS effectiveness to help promote higher-order thinking skills. Assessment results from these verification instruments should be available in January of 2007.