2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Assessment of a Final Project of a Large Statics Course on Fostering Creativity and Inclusion

Presented at Committee on Effective Teaching Presents: Creativity

The goal of the inclusive classroom is to provide equal opportunity for success for all students, regardless of their background and characteristics, e.g., race, gender, and neurodiversity. To this end, re-thinking and re-designing our courses and curricula to provide greater flexibility and accommodate students’ needs is of vital importance. The Statics course at this institution was recently re-designed to increase creativity and inclusion. One of the most important components of the course re-design has been the final project option, for which students may choose to create and solve their own problems as opposed to completing an exam to fulfill the learning objectives of the course. There are two options that students may choose for the final project: 1) the problem-solving track and 2) the creativity, or open-ended, track. This paper describes the final phase of the development of the project option and its assessment results regarding creativity and inclusion. The final project files from three semesters, between Fall 2020 and Fall 2021, and four sections were de-identified and rated for creativity by three experts in civil engineering, using the Consensual Assessment Technique. This paper reports the final project components and rubric, results related to students’ demonstrated creativity for the problem-solving versus open-ended track, and the lessons learned impact, and challenges of implementing the final project option.

Authors

Prof. Shinae Jang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3559-8762 University of Connecticut [biography]

Dr. Shinae Jang is an Associate Professor-in-Residence and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut. She received her B.S. and M.S. from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Civil Engineering. Dr. Jang’s research interests include wireless smart structures, structural health monitoring, non-destructive evaluation for infrastructure resilience, and engineering education. She taught 11 courses at UConn, including Statics, Structural Analysis, Senior Capstone Project, and new Structural Health Monitoring and Sensors courses. Dr. Jang is the recipient of the 2018 Civil Engineering Educator of the Year award from the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers, the 2021 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from the UConn School of Engineering, and the 2021 ASEE Emerging Leader Fellow Award from the Civil Engineering Division. She is the newsletter editor of the ASEE Civil Engineering Division and the treasurer of the ASEE Northeast Section. In addition, she is a faculty advisor of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) UConn Chapter and a licensed Professional Engineer in Connecticut.
Christa Taylor University of Connecticut [biography]

Christa L. Taylor, Ph.D., is an Independent Research Consultant and Research Affiliate with the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Her research is focused on issues in creativity, social cognition, and neurodiversity. She received a Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York before completing postdoctoral work at Yale University and Université catholique du Louvain in Belgium.

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