Thinking About Learning – Inferences from How We Support Curriculum Design

Abstract

Over the past 40 years there has been the development of well-structured workshops and educational movements to aid faculty members’ teaching development. The present study is a reflective analysis of a set of five well-established teaching development initiatives with the hope of inferring how engineering educators collectively think about students’ learning.The content of the initiatives is organized into two broad groups: teaching strategies and characteristics and attributes of student learning. Analysis shows that all of these initiatives emphasize teaching strategies and put much less emphasis on developing understanding of student learning beyond emphasizing two broad general principles on student learning: teaching should be student-learning centred, and learning for mastery requires purposeful active intellectual effort. However, beyond this there is little attention given to aligning teaching strategies with the cognitive mechanics occurring during learning. These initiatives seem to imply that faculty members should teach with a primary focus on student learning but that the details of the learning mechanics are of lesser concern in planning and delivering our courses.This analysis leads to the open question: “Would a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in learning allow educators to better align teaching strategies with the needs of student learning and to adapt to evolving student characteristics?