Figuring it out: Student Engagement towards Conceptual Understanding and Disciplinary Practice

ChE Seminar Series Presents: Milo Korestky
McDonnell Family Bridge Professor
Co-Director, Institute for Learning on Research and Instruction (IRLI)
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Department of Education
Tufts University

Abstract:

There has been considerable emphasis recently in transitioning chemical engineering classroom instruction from transmission-based lectures to active learning. Active learning has been defined broadly as “anything that you have your students do in class that gets them to actively engage with the material you’re trying to teach.”  This talk focuses on student engagement – that is, how students take up the challenging and complex work that we ask them to do as they form into professional engineers. I explore fundamental questions about student engagement in the active learning classroom: Engagement in what? Are there different kinds of engagement? I contrast two forms of engagement. The first looks at engagement for conceptual understanding using the Concept Warehouse, a tool developed around concept-based active learning. The second addresses engagement in disciplinary practices. When engaged in disciplinary practices, students use the concepts and discourses of engineering to “get somewhere” on an engineering task (develop a product, gain a better understanding). Neither way is inherently more correct or better, rather they are representations of learning that might provide useful ways to think about design choices within a certain context.

Biography:

Milo Koretsky is the McDonnell Family Bridge Professor and co-Director of the Institute for Research on Learning and Instruction (IRLI) at Tufts University. He holds a joint appointment in Chemical and Biological Engineering and in Education. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has research activity in areas related to engineering education. His group works on integrating technology into effective educational practices that promote the use of higher-level cognitive and social skills in engineering problem-solving and in promoting change towards motivating faculty to use evidence-based instructional practices. A particular focus is on what prevents students from being able to integrate and extend the knowledge developed in specific courses in the core curriculum to the more complex, authentic problems and projects they face in professional practice. Dr. Koretsky has received recognition through university and international awards and is a Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education and a Fellow of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research.