TOWARDS A NEW PEDAGOGY FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

There have been many advances over the past four or five decades in understanding brain architecture, and how the process of learning aligns with this architecture. One of the more interesting results has been that of John Sweller [1] and his theory of cognitive load. Sweller identifies the task of learning as effecting change in long-term memory. This long-term memory is, in his view, almost limitless. The problem lies in working, or short-term memory, which has a bottleneck of around five items. Any instructional mode which places too many items into working memory will be, at best, inefficient, and at worse, pointless. It is interesting to note that over the same decades new instructional modes, such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) have become popular [2]. Sweller, and others such as Paul Kirschner [3], argue that PBL cannot work as advertised, as the student is faced with too high a cognitive load; they can either learn how to solve the problem, or learn the underlying concepts, but not both. This paper outlines the theoretical background to this issue, and presents an intervention undertaken over the last decade in TU DUBLIN to devise new instructional modes which take account of cognitive load problems, whilst maintaining some of the advantages and benefits of PBL. This intervention initially followed the ideas of Louis Bucciarelli [4] of MIT on open design in Engineering education but was later adjusted to take into account the ideas of Kirschner on minimizing cognitive load in developing problem-solving skills.