High Impact Practices and Collaborative Teaching to Enhance Learning and Engagement in Engineering Design Project Course

Abstract

—Conceptual teaching-learning process in engineering disciplines fosters a deep understanding of content and facts and leverages students' domain knowledge to solve real-world problems. Combined with high-impact practices and collaborative/joint teaching in Engineering Design Project (EDP), this process enables students to apply captured expertise and skills in team-based project settings. Many conventional instructional methods for EDP are less effective because little consideration is given to conceptual learning, especially abstract design. The present research examined an experimental approach, which involved collaborative teaching in the EDP course at an engineering college in India jointly with a faculty at one of the largest higher education systems in the United States. The project's fundamental goal is to enhance teaching-learning of EDP using experience with real-world problems to enable concrete understanding of Design techniques through a co-teaching approach. The concept-based learning included team-based project experience in learning the Software Engineering Design concepts. Peer-Code Review was used as a powerful High Impact Practice (HIP) and student retrospective surveys. The empirical results of this study suggested that such HIPs and collaborative teaching-learning practices mandated Bloom’s taxonomy of more critical thinking at increasingly higher levels among students by improving the quality of learning. Further analysis of demographic survey questionnaire using descriptive statistical methods demonstrate the knowledge gain, attitudes, and interests of students from varied backgrounds to pursue higher studies in foreign universities.