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Effect of Student-Led Undergraduate Research Experience on Learning and Attitudes --A Practice in An Introductory Materials Science Course

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2014

Yuanyuan Zhou ,
Raymundo Arroyave  and
Miladin Radovic
Yuanyuan Zhou
Affiliation:
Department of Educational psychology, 4225 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4226 USA
Raymundo Arroyave
Affiliation:
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 3003 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3003 USA Department of Mechanical Engineering, 3123 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3123 USA
Miladin Radovic
Affiliation:
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, 3003 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3003 USA Department of Mechanical Engineering, 3123 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3123 USA
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Abstract

An introductory materials science course has been traditionally taught at Texas A&M University - like at many other universities - through lectures with minimal active student involvement. With this approach, most students just reproduce what they are given and accept it without any challenge or question. The authors have redesigned this course to include an active learning component. While the course consists of lecture-based classes during regular teaching hours to keep the essence of traditional teaching, the authors incorporated a research experience to their class in order to engage students and encourage them to apply the content seen in class to real-word problems with a higher level of expertise. The aim of the study was to discover the effectiveness of the authors’ redesign. We hypothesized that the research experience would facilitate the learning of knowledge content and the enthusiasm for the chosen field of study, i. e. engineering. The results reveal that students in the experimental condition consistently show a greater gain in knowledge, but there is no sufficient evidence suggesting that the research experience increase the student’s enthusiasm to be an engineer.

Keywords

educationgovernment policy and fundingdisplay
Type
Articles
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 1657: Symposium QQ – Advances in Materials Science and Engineering Education and Outreach , 2014 , mrsf13-1657-qq02-08
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 2014 

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References

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