Active Learning Exercises Requiring Higher Order Thinking Skills

As active learning becomes accepted in engineering classrooms, more and more faculty members are using in-class exercises. While these exercises are instrumental in helping students gain experience with concepts and processes covered in class, they typically allow students to perform satisfactorily while thinking and working at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (e.g. knowledge, comprehension, application). Term projects often are used to help students develop higher-order thinking skills and to bring design concepts into engineering courses. However, because projects have greater scope and larger work requirements, it is difficult to fit more than one or two projects into a semester-long course. Further, most students and many faculty view these longer-term assignments as mostly out-of-class work. While comprehensive and very worthwhile, these term projects are both burdensome to complete and cumbersome to grade. Hence, neither faculty nor students would relish increasing the number of these all-encompassing design projects attempted per semester. This paper describes efforts to develop and implement in-class exercises that encourage students to engage in higher-order thinking skills. The in-class exercise developed required only 10 to 30 minutes of class time, was easy to grade, and required meaningful work from the students. The exercise was developed for and implemented in an upper-division course in biological and agricultural engineering at Texas A&M University. Methods used to develop the in-class exercise, the specific exercise used, and results of implementation are discussed.