2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

What influences a student’s acceptance of an idea? Is it the persuasiveness of an argument? The clarity of the explanation? The authority of the teacher? Something else entirely? We all probably have an innate idea that idea acceptance involves one or more of these things, but how often do we consciously think about these elements in our teaching? As passionate educators, we typically want to make our teaching more engaging for our students, but this can often leave us puzzled when some of our students are still not learning our content.

This paper attempts to help address this problem by providing an Idea Acceptance Model that can be applied in the teaching of Engineering. The model is inspired by the Feedback Literacy Model which breaks feedback literacy down into “Appreciating Feedback”, “Making Judgements” and “Managing Affect” and proposes a similar 3-step model of “Appreciating the Topic”, “Evaluating the Idea” and “Managing Affect”. Satisfying all 3 components of the Idea Acceptance Model should lead to Idea Acceptance.

This model has come out of research that has targeted how to effectively teach students in STEM fields (like Derek Muller’s Thesis on Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education), as well as other work on the persuasiveness of an argument and the role of emotions in idea retention. The 3-step model can also be broken down further to include the sub-components of each of these fields. These include:

Appreciating the Topic: Motivating a Topic; Cultivating Interest; and Designing for Engagement
Making Judgements: Making Persuasive Arguments; Giving clear Explanations; and Exercising the Authority of a Teacher
Managing Affect: Dealing with Misconceptions; Increasing Emotional Investment; Moving past emotional barriers

It is suggested that educators should think carefully and critically about how their teaching relates to each of the idea acceptance components, as a roadblock in any one of them could prevent a student from ever accepting an idea. It is also theorized that different Engineering Topics lend themselves to different barriers. Highly technical topics likely have to contend with the “Appreciating the Topic” and “Making Judgements” sections (as students are less likely to have pre-existing affective barriers to technical ideas) whereas subjects covering professional skills likely have to focus on addressing the “Appreciating the Topic” and “Managing Affect” as students often need to be convinced of the value of these skills and often have pre-conceptions of their importance.