The Integration Of Cognitive Instructions And Problem/Project Based Learning Into The Civil Engineering Curriculum To Cultivate Creativity And Self Directed Learning Skills

Creativity and Self-Directed Learning involve higher order metacognitive (or executive) processes and are essentially interconnected. The attitudes and skills that embrace creativity and self-directed learning are specified explicitly or implicitly in the 2nd Edition of Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge (BOK2). However, traditional engineering education has paid less attention to deliberately cultivating students’ metacogntion development with explicit instructions based on effective theoretical frameworks from Cognitive Science and Educational Psychology. The efforts of engineering faculty members for helping students to develop their creativity and self-directed learning skills may consequently be minimized. This paper reveals conceptual models of creativity and self-directed learning, as well as motivation, from cognitive science literatures, and explores a new pedagogical model that is built on related theoretical framework and education practice and could be transferable for incorporating BOK2 requirements into civil engineering curricula. The development and implementation of the proposed pedagogical model are presented. Cognitive science literatures suggest that effective development of metacognition requires obtaining not only metacognition knowledge and strategies, but also metacognition control experience over specific cognitive tasks through efforts driven by intrinsic motivation. The creativity and self-regulated learning are essentially interacted attributes and can result in optimal performance and self-efficacy (or confidence), and in return help forming positive attitudes and enhancing intrinsic motivation, which lead to persistent efforts for pursuing further self-directed learning and creativity. There is a synergic cycles among these attributes. Based on cognitive theoretical frameworks, a new Pedagogical Model is proposed to integrate new Cognitive Instruction Model and Problem/Project-Based learning into co-curricular design projects, in which motivation, self-regulated learning, and creativity are synergized to cultivate desirable skills of self-regulated learning and innovative problem-solving for engineering students. The proposed Pedagogical Model has been developed from and integrated into a co-curricular design project in a mainstream civil engineering course through Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education project. The implementation outcomes indicate that all students participated in Problem/Project-Based learning and communicated more with instructors for advice and feedbacks. Most of students were motivated by the intellectual challenge of the course project and actively engaged in their self-directed learning of emerging technology and innovation. They gave positive comments on their experience. The implementation outcomes suggest that the proposed Pedagogical Model can be suitable for involving students in self-directed learning and creativity processes and promoting effective inquiry and use of strategies for development of students’ metacognitive skills in creative thinking and self-directed learning. Future improvement on the implementation of the proposed Pedagogical Model is also discussed.