The problem with big conferences is often that it impossible to go to all the sessions you want to, and it can be hard not to feel like you are missing important sessions with big implications for engineering education. No fear, to save us from this problem here, Harry Day, the Director of Education for MEE, shares some his highlights from the European Society for Engineering Education annual conference, SEFI24.
I was asked to pick my favourite session from the SEFI2024 conference to write about, but instead of focusing on just one I’d like to consider several sessions together into a bit of a story - and overview of my experience at the conference. Many ideas overlapped across the program, and some coherent (or semi-coherent) threads started to form.
One of the recurring challenges across the conference sessions is a familiar one:
How do we transform graduates into critical and reflective engineers, rather than just “exam-passers”? ….How do we make our students career-ready?
i) Career Readiness
A workshop on Career Readiness [1] explored the challenges of preparing students to be truly ‘career ready’, and what this actually means. The goal is not only to teach students engineering skills but to help them become professionals who “know what to do when they don’t know what to do” - to become independent contributors in the workplace.
The workshop discussions led to two key mindset shifts we (educators) would want to realise in our students:
Turning a ‘Perfection’ Mindset into a ‘Growth’ Mindset:
This involves embracing failure as a natural and essential part of learning. Many students accustomed to getting high marks in exams, have never faced real-world problem-solving. Fostering a growth mindset encourages them to see failure as a learning experience, not something to fear. Tell them they will fail, and how to learn from it.Turning a ‘Consumer’ Mindset into a ‘Participatory’ Mindset:
Rather than viewing the teacher as a didactic source of knowledge, students should see educators as enablers who guide them on their own learning journeys. This shift empowers students to take responsibility for their learning outcomes, recognizing their agency and ability to control their own successes. This also helps them describe and articulate their competence—valuable when transitioning into the workplace.
A presentation called “Design an Engineer” [2] also touched on this concept. It showed a case study where 1st year students design an "engineer" in terms of the competencies and skills they believe are required (for their future selves!). This gives students a clearer vision of their own upcoming growth journey, helping them buy into the learning process and see it in more of a growth and participatory fashion.
An engaging workshop on Process Based Learning [3] emphasized the importance of differentiating between cognitive levels and how process-based education is critical for teaching students to synthesise and tackle new ‘unseen’ problems. These are akin to the real world engineering challenges that require true problem solving. The framework presented a step-by step progression as students go from tackling a limited set of basic problems, to a range of familiar problems, to (finally) solving new and unfamiliar cases. Along the way students conduct reflections on the learning process, identifying what support they might need from their instructors (if any) to progress up to the next level. Some practical ways to aid this are;
Get students to design a Exam Questions for an unseen problems
Get students to explain how they can validate whether their answers are correct or not
Provide students with a rubric which is process based not outcome based
Assess (give marks for) the quality of student reflections on their own learning
This leads us on nicely to talk about reflection in more detail.
ii) The Importance of Reflection and Emotions in Education
Self-reflection plays a crucial role in nurturing student’s critical thinking skills and to contribute towards the aforementioned mindset shifts needed to bring graduates to a state of career readiness. Wednesday’s Keynote [4] talk & panel discussion, explored the notion that real-world engineering problems are generally not solved by an individual - but by multidisciplinary teams. This fed into discussions around the value of individual reflections being used as a thinking-aid, to help students make sense of their roles and contributions within multi-discipline engineering projects.
Student reflections tend to be rooted in emotion even if not articulated as so. Indeed the learning process for any student is often highly emotional for both Non-engineering and Engineering students. Yet, emotions are often overlooked in Engineering education - but they play a significant role in how students engage with reflection and self-development. The Keynote speech on Emotions in Engineering Education [5] elaborated on this theme and it was the first time I had ever heard the notions of ‘Emotion’ and ‘Engineering’ side by side. In my own experience of education, I feel I was educated to approach all problems as an impartial, cold, problem solving robot (...but in a good way). The question was posed in this session “can engineers relying on a cold analysis, be Responsible?”. To which the answers offered were ‘no’; so perhaps omission of emotional factors in our education is not only neglectful of the human students themselves but also neglectful of the resulting graduate attributes that we want to promote. I’ll leave you to mull that over…
Following this, a more practical (and less rhetorical) session on emotions in Engineering Education [6] gave me some tangible takeaways to implement at home. Education is a struggle, and students' emotional experience can be challenging. We the educators can reassure students that emotions are an integral part of learning and are normal! Tell students to expect ‘negatively valent’ emotions, and to try to recognise and reflect on what message those emotions are representing underneath. Taking this on board I personally have made a small but important addition to my first year teaching materials; a slide that acknowledges to students the emotional aspects of learning and offers some words of encouragement.
iii) Using Technology to Assist Self-Reflections
Supporting high quality, process-focussed self-reflections, and supporting students emotionally becomes ever more difficult at scale (when there are lots of students). So I will end by discussing a presentation on Reflection-Informed Learning [7] which sparked my imagination.
The case study showed how a mobile-app called CourseMirror was used by students to submit routine self-reflections on their learning during a module. With this tool, when a student enters a very short poor quality reflection (i.e. “the lesson was hard”), the app prompts the student to refine and improve it. This may be by asking the student “can you elaborate on why it was hard”. The tool detects length and text content within the student reflection, and offers prompts to improve its quality. This level of interactiveness struck me - it showed how reflective thinking can be nurtured with high student numbers, with a valuable impact on their learning. The continual engagement with reflective practice also developed attributes of the student's growth mindset, as mentioned previously.
What possibilities can these kind of tools hold for education? perhaps also in areas of live student course feedback and enriching learning experiences. They can provide reflection support, can empower students to engage in continuous learning and improvement, they could be used to get detailed live course feedback, or even in making the process of giving personalised assessment/feedback more efficient.
This serves as interesting food for thought as we enter the AI revolution, coupled with the challenge of rising student numbers……and as a favour to my colleague Edward, I will say no more on the topic of AI and stop there.
I hope this was informative (at least slightly), and gave you a flavour of what it’s like to attend the SEFI Engineering Education conference. Next year it’s in Finland!
Conference Sessions References
[1] Workshop: Chasing Career Readiness: Raising Engineers for Critical and Ethical Information Gathering and Analysis to Solve Complex Problems. Mark Natanael & Marta Bracha. Elsevier.
[2] Presentation: Design an Engineer - A Fundamental Learning Experience and Research Activity. Michael Noctor. Munster Technological University.
[3] Workshop: Strengthening Student Learning: From Outcome-Based to Process-Based Learning. Peter Ruijten-Dodoiu. Eindhoven University of Technology.
[4] Keynote: Computing Education, Cultures of Responsibility. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin.
[5] Keynote: Emotions in Engineering Education: The emergence of a new field of research. Johanna Lonngren.
[6] Presentation: The Emotional Journey of Computer Science Students in Team Projects: The Turbulences and Interplay Between the Academic Emotions. Nihat Kotluk. EPFL
[7] Presentation: The Role of Reflection-Informed Learning and Instruction in an Introductory Physics Course for Engineering and Science Students. Muhsin Menekse. Purdue University.