The Effect of Student Narration on Senior-level Engineering Classes

Narration (having students read text aloud, recite the main points, followed by thinking about the implications of the points) has been shown in many cases to develop deeper, more critical thinking in students at the K-12 level. Significant research in this area has not been accomplished at the college level where, particularly in engineering, textbooks are used by students primarily to solve problems in a rote manner, not to aid their overall understanding of how to solve problems or give them a background as to the beneficial applications of solving problems. By asking senior students in an instrumentation mechanical engineering class at the Air Force Academy to narrate, recite, and reflect on a pertinent engineering text in class, the authors hypothesized that students would demonstrate an increase in conceptual understanding of course material. Additionally, the authors believed the students’ perception of the narration method might have an impact on the technique’s success. Thus, the study, using two control classes and two research (narration) classes, investigated whether performance was impacted by the incoming GPA of the student, participation in the narration condition, and the students’ overall qualitative impression of the narration technique’s perceived benefits. In comparing performances on conceptual exam questions covering material introduced via student narration in the classroom, the narration students performed more poorly than the control group students who did not narrate. Because the narration group began with lower GPAs on average, we used GPA as a covariant; however,, the means were still significantly different, with the research group scoring an average of 5.8% lower across two exam sets of questions (p = 0.028). The qualitative data also suggest a less than positive impact of using narration; the students’ opinions of the narration became more negative as the semester progressed. Specifically, as the semester progressed the students had less faith that narration would aid their learning, with many believing that having the instructor cover the material would be as good or better than using narration. While it may seem counter-intuitive based on the above results, we are continuing our investigation of the incorporation, but will increase the use of narration time per lesson so that it more closely matches previous research where the results were more positive. This follow-on work has also begun honing assessment exam questions to more closely correlate with concepts targeted using narration, and ensuring instructor emphasis in teaching the concepts is controlled (equivalent emphasis whether using narrationdiscussion or traditional instructor lectures). While still preliminary, the initial results from implementing these changes have indicated the largest learning increases for narrating students, followed by smaller increases for students participating in post-narration discussion over those not participating.