Making The Connections: Facilitating Student Integration Of Chemical Engineering Concepts Into A Coherent Framework

One of the greatest challenges an instructor faces is helping his/her students to see the connections between material being covered in a particular class and that covered in previous courses or courses being taken concurrently. Opportunities exist within most engineering curricula to facilitate a student’s ability to integrate the bits and pieces of knowledge they gain in one class with their existing knowledge base. Helping students to connect subject matter in one course to familiar concepts from fluids, thermodynamics, heat transfer, mass transfer, kinetics, and process control as well as from the foundation courses in mathematics, physics and chemistry can aid students in establishing their operational framework and improving their problem solving skills [Haile, 2000]. Through connecters placed throughout the prerequisite courses, instructors can facilitate student integration of material from different courses and important underlying concepts into a coherent framework. The presentation of these underlying concepts in different courses may be of a nature that masks their true connection to one another, thereby inhibiting the ability of students to connect and integrate a seemingly new concept into their knowledge base. In this paper, opportunities are presented where concept integration may be especially beneficial.