The University of New Mexico

While a number of outreach programs, such as the Infinity project, has developed and implemented curricula and organizational structures to address the urgent need to educate middle- and high school students in engineering, there is a pronounced lack of research examining the cognitive and affective effects of pre-college engineering instruction. Building on the complementary expertise of the PIs in engineering education and educational psychology research, this project will address the need for empirically-based instructional techniques that effectively foster engineering problem solving skills and cognitive flexibility in pre-college students.

Based on cognitive load, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive-affective theories of learning with media we propose to investigate the following research questions:

1. How should we represent engineering concepts, practice problems, and worked examples to promote students’ problem solving and cognitive flexibility?

2. How should we design problem-solving practice to promote students’ learning?

3. Do pedagogical agents in the form of peer models affect students’ self-efficacy, learning, and learning perceptions?

4. What is the role of individual differences, such as spatial ability and gender, on learning?

To answer these questions, we will use mixed quantitative and qualitative methods within a set of randomized controlled experimental studies with pre-college students in outreach programs targeting young women and minorities in the States of Arizona and New Mexico. This work is based on a systematic relationship between theoretical framework, analysis of empirical data, and computational implementation and will have important theoretical and practical implications. First, it will advance our understanding of how pre-college students learn engineering by testing principles of instructional design that are based on cognitive science theory and research. In addition, the project has direct practical implications by helping to establish guidelines for producing state of the art instructional technologies that promote students' problem solving and cognitive flexibility in engineering. Specifically, the project will help identify effective concept representation and problem-solving practice methods and the potential of using peer models as pedagogical agents to promote pre-college students’ learning, self-efficacy, and interest in engineering careers.

Aside from the immediate impact on the minority students who will be participating from Arizona and New Mexico, the findings of this project will inform the development and implementation of effective outreach programs nationwide, thus substantially increasing their effectiveness to attract underrepresented groups to engineering careers. The project is motivated by a strong national and local need to attract pre-college underrepresented groups to engineering education. Women, for instance, represent only about 14% of the engineering workforce, although the represent 47% of the total workforce. Hispanics and Native Americans, who make up more than one third of the population in AZ and NM are similarly severely underrepresented in the engineering work force. Thus, the broader impact of this project is to develop, test, and disseminate effective learning tools aimed at promoting a larger representation of these groups in engineering and maintaining the necessary technological innovation capacity of our society.

 

 

 

 

 

Roxana Moreno, Co-Principal Investigator

Dr. Roxana Moreno is an Associate Professor in Educational Psychology at the University of New Mexico. She earned her Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in cognitive science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, U.S.A. and her J.D. in law from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research interests are in human memory, learning, and higher-order cognition with special interest in applying cognitive theories to educational technology and individual differences in learning. Before accepting a teaching position at the University of New Mexico, Dr. Moreno was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology Education by the National Science Foundation to investigate the interaction of rich experiential and reflective interactions mediated by software pedagogical agents in virtual reality environments. Her investigations involve undergraduate students as well as elementary students from local schools who are culturally and linguistically diverse.

Martin Reisslein, Co-Principal Investigator