Engineering Commons^™

A Comparison Of Traditional And Adaptive Comparative Judgment Assessment Techniques For Freshmen Engineering Design Projects, Scott R. Bartholomew, Greg J. Strimel, Andrew Jackson

Faculty Publications

This article examines the use of an alternative form of assessment for engineering design projects called adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ). The researchers employed an ACJ tool to evaluate undergraduate engineering student design projects in an effort to examine its’ reliability, validity, and utility in comparison with traditional assessment techniques. The ACJ process employed multiple judges to compare the design artifacts of 16 first-year engineering majors. The authors conducted an analysis of the reliability and validity of the ACJ method compared to the traditional rubric used to evaluate the project and the performance data of each student’s design prototype. For these …

The 360° Of Information Fluency Delivery To Freshman Engineering Students, Marian G. Armour-Gemmen, Robin A.M. Hensel, Mary L. Strife

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

For three years, engineering librarians from West Virginia University (WVU) have been teaching information fluency skills to 700-1000 freshman engineering students per year, using a specific information fluency cycle. The librarians’ responsibilities in the Fall 2013 course syllabus included teaching once in each section, providing a two-hour, in-library group sessions to accommodate almost 700 students, delivering an intellectual property Blackboard™ module for students to complete over a specific period of time, and requiring students to complete a Plagiarism Avoidance Tutorial with quiz. Some of these components are similar to those of past semesters. However, past collection of the data was …

Nanotechnology Education—First Step In Implementing A Spiral Curriculum, Ganesh Balasubramanian, Vinod K. Lohani, Ishwar K. Puri, Scott W. Case, Roop L. Mahajan

Ganesh Balasubramanian

A nanotechnology learning module was implemented into a freshman engineering course at Virginia Tech. The novelty of our approach is that an established spiral curriculum model has been employed, for the first time to the best of authors’ knowledge, to design the nanotechnology option. The module was piloted in a freshman class (180 students) during spring ‘08. The key components included (1) a prior knowledge survey, (2) a 40-minute in-class presentation on basic nanotechnology concepts, (3) an activity that involves nanoscale image analysis and the plotting of molecular forces usingLabVIEWsoftware,and(4)apost-modulesurvey.Lessonslearnedfromthepilotimplementationwereincorporated appropriately to expose roughly 1450 freshmen to nanotechnology basics in …

A Model For Coordination And Management Of Resources For Multiple Sections Of An Active Learning Style Freshman Course, Jean Nocito-Gobel, Amy Thompson, Carl Barratt, Michael Collura

Engineering and Applied Science Education Faculty Publications

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract.

Much research in recent years has verified that an active learning style approach to freshman engineering design courses adds value to undergraduate engineering programs and improves retention rates. Many universities have established First Year Programs to coordinate the activities and classes for first year students. However, not all universities have the funds to establish programs separate from disciplinary programs. How can faculty that are not assigned to a First Year Program efficiently manage multiple sections of a hands-on course with limited resources? …

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