On teaching
I recently had occasion to write a few paragraphs reflecting on my approach to teaching–by which I mean, in this case, my own teaching that I do as a professor rather than the teaching I study more formally as an academic.
I thought I’d share a some of those thoughts for those who might be interested….
New Grant: NUE: A Nanotechnology Certificate Program for Engineering Undergraduates
Nanotechnology is an area of growing interest among the scientific community in the United States. With powerful applications in the worlds of both biology and electronics, this will be an important area of research in the 21st century. In order to help create engineers to fill this new demand, the Epistemic Games Group and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will collaborate to create a Nanotechnology Certificate for undergraduates. This certificate will offer formal training in nanoscale science, engineering and technology (NSET) to students at the B.S. level and provide formal acknowledgment of this training.
New material concerning nanotechnology and the societal implications thereof will be introduced into several pre-existing courses, and two new courses will be created dedicated solely to them. The Epistemic Games Group will work with co-investigators in the College of Engineering to develop the game Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project, which will be a core component of one of the new nanotechnology courses.
The Principal Investigator and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. Wendy Crone, Dr. Naomi Chesler, Dr. Kristyn Masters, Dr. David Shaffer, and Dr. Kevin Turner. The grant, for $199,961, will begin on January 1, 2010 through the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Education and Centers Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education unit. The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.
New Grant: Professional Practice Simulations for Engaging, Education and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers
At present, the pool of engineers in the US is not sufficient or diverse enough to meet the needs of a growing high-tech community and produce solutions to the difficult problems our country faces both nationally and internationally. Therefore, harnessing the power of new educational innovations to improve the teaching of engineering students is a top priority.
Epistemic Games Group has received funding to help us bring the experience and skills we’ve gained from our previous games to the undergraduate environment as we develop a new game for engineering students. Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project will provide a dialysis simulation based on authentic engineering practices. This game will be incorporated into an engineering undergraduate course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, allowing us to determine how well these students learn through playing the game, as opposed to through a more traditional textbook-based environment.
One advantage of a professional practice-based game is that it introduces skills and techniques not discussed in gatekeeper math and science courses. This should help convince students who otherwise would have been discouraged that they too can be engineers, and thus help to increase the diversity of the field.
The game will help to create learning materials, teaching techniques, and faculty experience. It will also make contributions to the knowledge about engineering education by conducting a robust evaluation of current theories of professional learning in a novel context. Once complete, the game will be shared with engineering institutions nation-wide, enabling faculty at a variety of institutions to adapt and customize it for their own use and research.
The Principal Investigator and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. David Shaffer and Dr. Naomi Chesler. The grant, for $499,993, was awarded September 1, 2009 through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education – Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Stage 2 project. The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.
New Grant: EAGER Proposal for Research in Measurement and Modeling: Dynamic STEM Assessment through Epistemic Network Analysis
While previous efforts have focused on whether students master specific scientific facts, math skills, and so on, epistemic network analysis (ENA) will enable us to research whether and how students link the skills, knowledge, identity, and so forth learned in-game in a coherent way of thinking about complex STEM problems. In other words, we won’t just be studying if students can solve problems, but whether they are learning to solve problems in the manner of an engineer or other scientist.
ENA is a new conceptual and statistical approach to STEM learning, and a potentially revolutionary one. While developed in the context of epistemic games, ENA is an approach which can be used in any complex STEM situation where the connections between things learned are more important than the isolated pieces themselves.
The PI and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. David Shaffer and Dr. André Rupp. The grant, for $300,000, will begin on January 1, 2010 through the National Science Foundation’s Division on Research in Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL). The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.
New Grant: AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
Working in conjunction with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, we will develop an AutoMentor module based on a program called AutoTutor which helps teach students about science and technology topics. Using a Wizard of Oz methodology (in which data is collected on student/mentor interactions over multiple instances of game play), we hope to determine a method for producing effective professional feedback from non-player characters. Professional feedback helps students develop professional identities for themselves: engineers think like engineers, are interested in engineering, and know about physics, mathematics, chemistry, and other technical fields. In short, to be an engineer, you have to think like an engineer and see yourself as such.
AutoMentor represents an approach to the problem of providing the opportunity to learn STEM subjects. By creating a virtual professional mentor for students, we hope to make STEM education more motivating and inclusive. AutoMentor will initially be attached to Urban Science; eventually the software will be widely available and represent an important component of STEM games in the future. The development of AutoMentor will also represent an important contribution to our knowledge about game-based learning.
The Principal Investigator and Co-PIs on this project are Dr. David Shaffer, Dr. Michael Gleicher, Dr. Arthur Graesser, Dr. Robert Mislevy, and Kristen Scopinich. The grant, for $3,500,000, was awarded on September 1, 2009 through the National Science Foundation’s Division on Research in Learning – Discovery Research K-12. The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.
