Engineering, reflection and life long learning

Abstract

Reflection skills have been used in various academic fields to bring self awareness into what has been learned from an exercise. We propose that if an engineering student is aware of the information he or she currently knows as well as what remains to be learned, then that student should possess the ability to more efficiently make the necessary assumptions and gather the appropriated information in order to solve the problem at hand. Our general premise is that by engaging in active and repeated reflection exercises, undergraduate engineering students will develop stronger reflective judgment skills; and hence, we would anticipate that these students will show initial signs of becoming Schon's reflective practitioner1 or achieve higher levels of King and Kitchener's reflective judgment scale2. That is, our engineering students will better recognize in the broadest sense the various stakeholders, and how their engineering decisions will impact them, in both the short and long terms. Here we have studied undergraduate industrial engineering student teams resolving Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs). After completing each MEA, each student was then given a reflection tool (RT) requiring him or her to address several of the ABET professional skills. The students' reflection responses coupled with the MEA graded group solutions provided a data set for analysis. Student data was coded to determine the quantity of concepts learned, as well as the depth and quality of reflection. From here, based on King and Kitchener's Reflective Judgment Model, students were categorized into: pre-reflective thinking, quasi-reflective thinking or reflective thinking groups. These categories were then compared with the grades on the MEAs. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.