Pattern of Task Interpretation and Self-Regulated Learning Strategies of High School Students and College Freshmen during an Engineering Design Project.

AbstractThe objective of this exploratory study was to describe patterns in self-regulated learning (SRL) for both high school students and college freshmen while engaged in a design activity. The main research question guiding this study was: How did high school and first-year college students self-regulate their approaches to learning when engaged in an engineering design project? Specific focus was given by exploring how these two groups of students engaged in (1) task interpretation in relation to reported strategy use during the design process; and (2) task interpretation in relation to reported strategy use in project management.Students at one high school in the state of Colorado and first year undergraduate engineering students at one public university in the state of Utah participated in this study. High school students worked in an Architectural and Robotics Design classes (n=27). College freshmen worked in a mechanical engineering solid modeling course (n=70). A survey instrument and Web-based design journal entries were administered at early and later stages of the project to capture students' SRL, including task interpretation (TI) and reported use of planning (PS), cognitive (CS), and monitoring/fix-up (MF) strategies. Descriptive statistics, non-parametric statistics, and graphical views were used to analyze survey responses. Entries from students' design journals were segmented and coded using an SRL model and interpreted to triangulate and complement survey data to achieve better insight about the employed strategies of these two groups.Not surprisingly, findings suggested that, for the most part, first-year college students scored higher than high school students on task interpretation and reported use of planning, cognitive, and monitoring/fix-up strategies. Journal entries also revealed that college freshmen were more thorough in identifying and describing design strategies for their projects than were their high school student counterparts. Most importantly, differences in the quality of SRL were observed within each group, suggesting that students at both educational levels varied in their self-regulated performance. Further, while students in both groups had relatively good awareness of task demands, they were less aware of how to translate that task understanding into proper plans and plan execution across the design process and project management. This article discusses potential implications for design instruction for both groups of students.Keywords: Engineering Design, Grades 9-12, College freshman, Metacognition, Self-regulated learning1. IntroductionTremendous efforts have been devoted to improving student learning in high school pre-engineering and college engineering courses. One of the critical needs for advancing student learning in these contexts, as highlighted by Bransford and his colleagues in their book, How People Learn, is to investigate learning process from a metacognitive perspective (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). According to Zimmerman (1989), metacognition is heavily implicated in self-regulated learning (SRL) which plays a significant role in learning and is an important predictor of academic performance. Models of self-regulation typically describe how metacognitive knowledge (e.g., about tasks, learning, strategies) and metacognitive skills (Le., self-regulating strategies used in the deliberate management of learning) interweave in the context of authentic activity (e.g., see Butler & Cartier, 2004; Cartier & Butler, 2004). With design as a core activity in engineering, design projects have been recognized as an effective activity to support learning in science, technology and mathematics (Sanders & Wells, 2010; Schaefer, Sullivan, & Yowell, 2003). Therefore, for that specific context, design has been identified as a catalyst in STEM education. Design tasks are often constructed to involve the solving of an in ill-structured problem, which reguires a high level of SRL strategies use. …