Knowledge Construction
in Undergraduate Engineering
Learning assistants in mechanical engineering
Learning Assistants (LAs) are pedagogically trained undergraduate students who support student-centered active learning in courses they have already taken. Their role is to support student-to-student interaction, deepen student thinking and reasoning, and foster active, inclusive participation by students from all backgrounds and identities in class and/or lab activities. Their pedagogical training has a focus on productive questioning, listening to and interpreting student reasoning in the STEM domains, and inclusive and welcoming instructional practice. Our lab supports the Mechanical Engineering Learning Assistant Program at Tufts and conducts research to explore learning and participation dynamics within the program.
Knowledge construction in engineering science courses
For her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2018, Jessica Swenson investigated the ways that undergraduate students work in groups on homework problem sets in engineering science courses.
Jess examined undergraduate engineering science homework sessions to identify sense-making conversations that may have lead to conceptual knowledge construction. These episodes of sense-making – or in some cases, only bids for sense-making – were analyzed to understand student shifts from task production to knowledge construction. Participants were also interviewed about homework sessions and other assigned tasks in engineering courses to explore their epistemologies. The interviews showed specifically what students believe counts as knowledge in engineering, how they believe they best develop engineering knowledge, and what pedagogical choices by the instructor students notice as productive for their development of knowledge.
Check out her full dissertation, "Developing knowledge in engineering science courses: Sense-making and epistemologies in undergraduate mechanical engineering homework sessions," on our Publications page.
Social networks among mechanical engineering students
For his senior thesis, Hernán Gallegos explored the social networks that students create within an undergraduate mechanical engineering department. The goal of the study was to examine the degree to which certain factors (class year, race/ethnicity, gender, and grade point average) contributed to a student’s connectivity. Students who were the most connected to others had a high "degree centrality." He found that both gender and race/ethnicity did not play a large role in a students' degree centrality. However, class year did have a significant impact with juniors and seniors exhibiting higher degree centrality.
Find his full thesis, "Social Network Analysis of an Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Learning Environment," on our Publications page.