Project Summary This project examines the role that the opportunity to reflect can play in the integration of prior knowledge in the design of engineering projects. The data gathered offers a glimpse of the characteristics of an integrative engineer and provides an insight into the role that engineering educators can play in creating engineers who are flexible, adaptable, resilient and ultimately lifelong learners.

Why This Study My interest in scholarship of teaching and learning stems from my desire to enhance and improve the manner in which students learn to be engineers. Over the past years, my professional work has focused on activities that increase student's motivation and interest in studying engineering. Initially, my projects focused on intervention activities based on anecdotal evidence of what might work rather than results of rigorous research. Now, I seek to conduct scholarly investigations upon which to base my intervention activities. My participation in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Scholars Program has afforded me the opportunity to conduct such a research project and to network with a community of scholars conducting scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research.

Sankofa: Return and Get It Background In my Carnegie project entitled "Integrative Learning in Engineering Design: The Role of Reflection", I attempt to grasp the impact of an engineer's use of reflection in producing a successful design. The complexity of engineering projects require not only the incorporation of sound technical skills but also the integration of the social, legal, economical, historical and political constraints that define the range of solutions to engineering problems. I hypothesize that the opportunity to reflect allows the designer to first recall and then incorporate these constraints into the design. This project focuses on the work of civil engineering students in a senior level design course. Following the traditional civil engineering curriculum, these students have completed six semesters of technical course work complemented with humanities, economics and social science courses designed to prepare them for their senior level capstone design courses. The capstone course simulates a real world design experience that presents two distinct challenges for the student. First, they must recall, and often do not, the materials learned in earlier courses. Secondly, they must integrate that prior knowledge, both technical and non-technical, into the design. In this research project, I examine the effectiveness of teaching the reflection process in an engineering class by creating opportunities for engineering students to reflect on prior knowledge during the design of an engineering project. I then examine the level of integration of that knowledge in their designs. The data gathered offers a glimpse of the characteristics of an integrative engineer.

Foundation Engineering Class Evidence Gathered During the fall of 2005, my Foundation Engineering course served as the laboratory for this exploratory study. This senior level course exposes the students to the design of the foundations for buildings, bridges and dams while developing their appreciation for the importance of life long learning. The work of the eight students (2 females and 6 males) in the class is the primary source of data for this study. All students gave their voluntary consent to participate. Students completed four assignments with each assignment differing in what was designed, the audience for the finished product and the size of the design team (i.e. groups, pairs or individuals). In each case, the participants prepared a reflective essay that accompanied their design. It is these reflective essays that are the primary source of data in this study. A description of the assigned projects is provided below. Letter to a Student Engineer Student teams (of 4) prepared a letter to a student engineer describing the use of prior knowledge and experiences in the design of retaining walls. Electronic Presentation to Technical Audience Student teams (of 4) designed and delivered a PowerPoint presentation on their analysis and assessment of a landslide that has occurred in the past ten years. Students prepared a one-page reflection essay that described and catalogued what prior knowledge and experiences were incorporated in their analysis. Poster Presentation to Lay Audience Student pairs prepared an electronic poster illustrating the results of their work on assessing the settlement potential of a given project site. Accompanying the poster was a one-page reflection essay that described and catalogued what prior knowledge and experiences were incorporated in their assessment of the site. Technical Report to the Client Students individually prepared a professional technical report on the design of the foundation for a building. The report included a reflection section on the use of prior knowledge and experiences in the design of the foundation. At the end of the study, students were asked to complete a culminating reflection on their experiences in the course. The instructor asking the following open-ended questions: How did the opportunity to reflect enhance or detract from your learning? How did your ability to integrate previous learning change over the semester? Course Snapshot Syllabus Student Work: Letter to Student Retaining Wall Design Student Work: Electronic Presentation Landslides Student Work: Poster Presentation Settlement Analysis Student Work: Technical Report Building Foundation

Emerging Results The reflective essays written for four distinct audiences--a letter to underclass civil engineering students, a PowerPoint presentation for a group of scientific but non-engineering professionals, a poster for a lay audience in a town hall meeting, and a client, representing the traditional engineering project audience--coupled with the end-of-study reflection provide the rich data of this study. Based on the analyses of these data, four assertions have been made about the characteristics of a reflective engineer. The assertions are accompanied by examples pulled from end-of-study reflection and reflective pieces submitted with the design projects. All students are provided with aliases in order to maintain confidentiality with the reflective essays. As the end-of-study reflections were completed anonymously, no names will be provided for any citations pulled from these reflections. The examples are cited as reported in order to maintain the integrity and validity of the responses. Assertion #1: The integrative engineer knows that the ability to incorporate previous knowledge is a crucial component in engineering design and problem solving. By the end of the semester, a number of students were able to reflect in a manner which supports this assertion: "The real fact was that integration was always being used however it was not being acknowledged until this point. The acknowledgment of this fact encouraged a wider scope for the integration to also include social sciences which are often overlooked by engineers for example economics in referring to walls and landslides". Assertion #2: The integrative engineer develops her design in a societal context. The ability of the engineer to consider his/her impact on civil society prior to entering the workforce can play a crucial role in how the engineer will design structures and how personable and relational s/he may be with clients. Students argue "[reflection] helped because we were forced to apply the information and new concept to every life situation" and specifically discussing the global impact of design by asserting "I think that it in a sense "humanized" the engineering process moving away from the calculations for a while and think of the people and environment that we are designing for a feature I think is key to engineers". Assertion #3: The integrative engineer is self-evaluative before, during and after project design. The students were able to best express this assertion in the course evaluations. Discussions included statements such as "I believe that reflection occurs in almost all our classes. However, the opportunity to organize one's thoughts and put it into words was achieved in this course" and "the reflection I think was generally a good experience. The practice required one to stop and analyze the underlying effects of a design on various aspects of life". Assertion #4: The integrative engineer can readily adapt language to engage multiple stakeholder--clients, public officials, diverse team members, and a global customer base. The ability of the integrative engineer to present results of design to any audience is important because it shows the engineer is adaptable, able to tailor the language of findings to suit a variety of audiences. How adequately were students able to adapt their language to accommodate these audiences? In explaining the risks associated with settlement, Hana and Gary explain to their lay audience in the town hall meeting "unquestionably, all houses settle the amount might be insignificant or uniform and leave no sign...the cracks on the structures we work in and even live in, [and] doors unable to close [with] time". Here this partner team clearly delineates to the audience what settlement looks like in structures that are familiar.

Implications for Teaching Integration is coupled with reflection in this learning process. Many times, engineering professors and instructors may reflect on the teaching practices incorporated during the semester course. Instructors are constantly and consistently taking time to reflect on "their own or someone else's teaching, refram[ing] problems, compar[ing] practice with personal theories, and tak[ing] new actions" (Abell, Bryan & Anderson, 1998, p. 492). These moments of reflection allow the professor to consider modifications and adjustments to syllabi, lectures and projects so that the knowledge intended to be taught is accurately explained. Abell, Bryan and Anderson (1998) purport "the ultimate intent of reflection is to gain a deeper understanding of their practice in order to improve it" (p. 492). This conceptualization of reflection implies that not only professors but students as well should be reflective in their individual learning process. The results of this study have indicated that integration is a learning component that has always been present in the engineering classroom but students were not able to acknowledge its existence. The reflective learning tools implemented in the Foundations Engineering course allow the students to be able to see first-hand the co-existence of integration not only in this course but in all of the courses taken on the university level. Implications for further research would suggest modifying the course and its objectives so that the following questions can be efficiently examined and discussed: 1) does the opportunity to reflect on previous learning encourage the integration of that learning into an engineering design, 2) what are the advantages/disadvantages of each method of reflection in promoting use of prior knowledge in the design, 3) how do group reflections, pair reflections and individual reflections differ in the depth/level of prior knowledge recollection and 4) how does the reflection prompt (i.e. the target audience) impact the depth/level of prior knowledge recollection? In addition, a new study would examine assertion four from this study and its correlation to the depth and knowledge utilized given a target audience for reflection. Annotated Bibliography