2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

It is well-established that students have difficulty transferring theory and skills between courses in their undergraduate curriculum. At the same time, many college-level courses only concern material relating to the course itself and do not cover how this material might be used elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that students are unable to transfer and integrate knowledge from multiple areas into new problems as part of capstone design courses, for example, or in their careers. More work is required to better enable students to transfer knowledge between their courses, learn skills and theory more deeply, and to form engineers who are better able to adapt to new situations and solve “systems-level” problems.

Various authors in both the cognitive and disciplinary sciences have discussed these difficulties with the transfer of knowledge, and noted the need to develop tools and techniques for promoting knowledge transfer, as well as to help students develop cross-course connections. This work will address these barriers to knowledge transfer, and crucially develop the needed activities and practices for promoting transfer by answering the following research questions: (1) What are the primary challenges experienced by students when tasked with transferring theory and skills from prior courses, specifically mathematics and physics? (2) What methods of prior knowledge activation are most effective in enabling students to apply this prior knowledge in new areas of study?

Here, we present a summary, to date, of the findings of this investigation. These findings are based on an analysis of the problem solving techniques employed by students in various years of their undergraduate program as well as faculty experts. A series of n=23 think aloud interviews have been conducted in which participants were asked to solve a typical engineering statics problem that also requires mathematical skills to solve. Based on participant performance and verbalizations in these interviews, various barriers to the knowledge transfer process were identified (lack of prior knowledge, accuracy of prior knowledge, conceptual understanding, lack of teaching of applications, language of problem, curricular mapping). At the same time, several interventions designed to promote the transfer of knowledge were incorporated into the interviews and tested. Initial results demonstrated the potential effectiveness of these interventions (detailed in the poster/paper) but questions were raised as to whether participants truly understood the underlying concepts they were being asked to transfer.

This poster presentation will cover a holistic representation of this study as well as the findings to date.