Making Connections: Ensuring Strength of the Civil Engineering Curriculum

A fundamental structural design philosophy is to make connections stronger than the elements they connect. The same must be true within engineering education: the connections between concepts and courses must be stronger (or at least as strong) as the content learned. Teachers are encouraged to create structure for new knowledge, sometimes referred to as scaffolding. This scaffolding, much like shoring for a reinforced concrete building, can only be safely removed when the knowledge structure created by the student has gained sufficient strength, including connection strength. An inability to recall previously learned knowledge is a symptom of an underlying problem: a lack of effective understanding of engineering concepts and principles to then see their application in a new context. In other words, the connections between concepts and applications are weak. To address this underlying problem, civil engineering students at the US Military Academy at West Point were required to solve review problems on each homework assignment in two civil engineering design courses. This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings of these assignments and their implementation. Assessment includes three semesters of academic performance, time spent outside of class, student feedback, and teacher observations. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION How many educators are frustrated when students seem unable to recall something discussed in class the previous week? How often are teachers disappointed in their students’ ability to identify and correctly apply concepts from prerequisite courses to their current course? How many times do students disappoint their instructors by not seeing how the concept currently being covered builds directly on a concept previously learned? After first teaching CE404 (Design of Steel Structures) and CE483 (Design of Reinforced Concrete Structures), the author responded to each of these questions with: “Quite often! Nearly every lesson! I’m frustrated about this! What can I do about it?” Importantly, it is not instructor frustration that matters most: it is students’ longterm success. As Hopkins et al state, “success in some disciplines [engineering among them] depends on students possessing a cumulative body of knowledge and is thwarted by poor retention of foundational content.” This cumulative body of knowledge is often described as knowledge structure and there is a problem: the connections within many students’ mental knowledge structure are weak and, therefore, the structure itself is ineffective. As a structural engineer, the author became concerned with the integrity of the structures being built in his students’ minds and realized a new design philosophy was necessary for the courses he taught. The way students organize, or structure, what they learn is critically important. This structure can be visualized as connections between topics or concepts and it is commonly accepted that “students will learn and remember information better if they have many cognitive associations with it; learning of isolated information is more difficult and less permanent than learning of information that is connected to a network of other material.” As students learn new material they relate it to previous knowledge. This is often done subconsciously with students building “sparse, superficial knowledge structures” but is more effective when done deliberately. Prior knowledge must be activated, sufficient, appropriate, and accurate. Methods to activate accurate prior knowledge include using activities to generate prior knowledge and being explicit in connecting new concepts to prior knowledge. As a teacher, helping students make correct connections is a vital responsibility. One way to do so is to emphasize differences and similarities of new concepts to ones covered previously in the course or in pre-requisite courses. Lowman explains that “it is difficult to learn ideas that are very similar unless the differences between them are emphasized. Conversely, it is easier to learn disparate ideas if their similarities are emphasized.” 2(p135) Building the structure of knowledge must occur as a student progresses through a program of study. The stronger the connections, the more effective students will be at retrieving and applying prior knowledge to their current course. Beyond college, this ability to retrieve and transfer accurate knowledge will directly affect their professional success. Developing strong connections requires hard work and, surprisingly, methods of teaching and learning that are not the most intuitive. This is the premise of the book Make it Stick which describes the science behind effective learning. The authors explain that learning is most effective when practice is spaced out and subjects are interleaved. While this may feel harder and less productive to students, research shows that it leads to better learning in the long run. There are a variety of benefits of incorporating practice retrieving information. These include improved learning and retention, thinking skills, metacognition, mental organization, and even students’ engagement in class. One method to practice retrieving information is spaced practice. As opposed to blocked, or massed, practice, spaced practice requires students to apply knowledge long after they have been initially learned the knowledge. This idea is not new. For example, Doré and Hilgard, demonstrated its effectiveness at improving retention of psychomotor skills in 1937 and were building on literature that began around the turn of the twentieth century. The topic has continued to be of interest to cognitive psychologists and educators alike. Among the recent contributions to the understanding of spaced practice is that it has a more pronounced effect on simpler tasks and more time between practice sessions improves the effect, regardless of task complexity. In fact, spaced learning has been shown to have little to no effect on immediate recall but is “effective in delayed tests, particularly if they come two to four weeks after learning.” In other words, allowing time to forget some details leads to better encoded learning when students refresh their memories by having to apply that knowledge again. This is referred to as “successive relearning” requiring “multiple successful retrievals” over a period of time. Interleaving describes the practice of including a variety of concepts within an assignment rather than focusing on one concept at a time. While blocked practice may lead to better short term learning, spaced practice and interleaving of concepts leads to dramatic improvement in longterm retention and ability to retrieve knowledge. In a comparison of ten different learning techniques, spaced practice was one of two that showed high utility in improving student learning for a variety of subjects (the other was practice testing). Interleaved practice showed moderate utility with indications that high utility is likely to be shown with additional research. In addition to improving the long-term retention, concentration on the task is also better when practice is spaced. Metcalf and Xu reported that people’s minds wandered less in spaced practice when compare to massed practice. Beyond learning information and being able to retrieve it later, transfer of that knowledge to new contexts is also of critical importance to effective learning. In How People Learn, the authors explain that “knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce transfer” and “all new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn.” 12(p53) In the same book, they describe factors that influence the ability of students to transfer knowledge to new contexts including: time and method spent learning the concept in the first place, a focus on demonstrating understanding rather than memory of facts, and the contexts in which the concept is applied. The question left for the teacher is: how can I structure a course and create opportunities for students to interact with the material in ways that improve long-term learning and the ability to transfer knowledge all while ensuring students develop mastery of the course content? This sounds like a tall order and it is. Mirth offers seven specific suggestions for engineering teachers to consider and describes how each is linked to a variety of effective learning strategies. The suggestions are: summary doodling, preclass problems, notebooks, homework, review problems, design problems, and computer analysis. In their discussion about retrieval and transfer of stored knowledge, Felder and Brent discuss the importance of rehearsal to reinforce the schema associated with long-term memory. This rehearsal includes repeated recollection or exposure to the concept along with practicing procedures. Rehearsal improves a student’s ability to retrieve information but also enhances transferability. Exercises of rehearsal can and should be integrated into class meetings. These may include “assignments that call for applying the procedure in different contexts, and explicit statements of conditions that make one procedure more appropriate than another for a particular type of problem.” 14(p71) This is important: well-crafted assignments provide students with opportunities to interact with the material in a way that leads to long-term retention along with improved ability to retrieve information and apply it to new contexts (that is, transfer). Doing so leads to mastery which requires students to acquire and integrate component skills and know in which context it is appropriate to apply those skills. In other words, mastery is about more than an ability to demonstrate application of something covered in class. To facilitate mastery in students, teachers must diagnose weak or missing component skills among their students and provide isolated practice of those skills. To