(158g) Developing Metacognitive Engineering Teams through Studying Learning Preferences

Student awareness and understanding of their learning own skills, performance, preferences, and barriers is referred to as metacognition. This paper describes efforts to instill metacognition into engineering students, through writing and team-building exercises. This study examines teams of students doing open-ended research and design projects through the Junior/Senior Engineering Clinic.

The Learning Combination Inventory (LCI) is a survey instrument developed by Johnston and Dainton. The theoretical basis for the LCI is the Interactive Learning Model, which posits that learning processes occur through four distinct learning patterns: sequential, precise, technical, and confluent. The LCI was used to profile the learning style of each student in the Rowan Chemical Engineering department. A series of targeted writing exercises was then devised to require students to think consciously about team dynamics and how to overcome barriers. In order to assess the effectiveness of the targeted writing exercises and the LCI, during the 2004-05 academic year, teams of students were broken into four groups: 1) teams who were given instruction regarding the LCI results and their implications for teaming, but who did not do the writing exercises, 2) teams who did the targeted writing exercises but did not have the LCI training, 3) teams that had both LCI training and the targeted writing exercises, and 4) teams that had neither. The results showed that students who received training on LCI and how it related to team dynamics achieved better performance on the project than their classmates who weren't exposed to the LCI, and also had measurably better attitudes towards teaming than they had at the beginning of the semester. This poster will detail the latest results of the study.