Engineering Research Fundamentals
The amount of content that someone needs to be familiar with in order to be a successful engineer is significant. A student is unlikely to learn everything they need to know in four years, let alone in a semester or two. Even if a student understood everything there is to understand throughout an undergraduate degree, the field is continually changing and they need to be continually improving to be really successful. Not to mention the skills they need to develop. As the undergraduate research coordinator, I helped design a course that the primary learning objective was to help students develop the character traits (dispositions) that will help them be a successful engineer.
The disposition of a successful engineer is a slightly abstract concept. Someone who has the disposition of an engineer dives into problems and new concepts, applies critical-thinking to their analyses, is continually learning, demonstrates tenacity in working through complex topics, is self-managed (independent), and keeps organized notes. If you think about someone who is “on it”, or “has their life together”, this was our primary learning objective (at least when it comes to doing engineering).
To help communicate what the disposition of an engineer is, we broke up the objective into three areas:
- Engineers independently pursue the knowledge and skills requisite for engineering problem-solving.
- Engineers demonstrate depth in their analysis skills.
- Engineers are intrinsically motivated to do their work.
The course was designed to help students develop these traits by immersing them in the work of graduate level research. By scaffolding the process of asking a research question, developing an experiment to gather data, interpreting that data, and comparing to prior research, students were able to begin the process of owning their own learning. Since the course is taught one-on-one by a graduate student, it is a unique opportunity for the student to develop regardless of where they began. It was our observation that students who succeeded at this learning objective tended to be successful in all other learning objectives.