2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Learning is a lifelong process exercised within and beyond the classroom and a vital skill in almost all technical professions. Engineers, in particular, are impacted by rapidly evolving technologies and practices that require continuous learning and adaptation long after their training and the initial transition into their professional careers. However, despite the critical role of learning in their academic success and profession, engineering students experience academically rigorous and challenging courses with very little emphasis or conscious focus on learning strategies that power effective learning.
Often-used learning strategies such as rereading, highlighting, repetition, and memorization are intuitive for many students, yet do not facilitate the higher-order thinking required to solve difficult engineering problems and understand concepts. As a result, weak learning strategies are an important factor in why students often initially struggle in their courses to reach the level of concept mastery and the ability to synthesize, apply and evaluate problems using engineering principles; and why they may continue to struggle as lifelong learners. The consequences of ineffective learning are already transcending in student’s academic careers: slowing their curricular progress and affecting their ability to adjust to university life, build self-regulatory skills, and gain a sense of control over their learning experiences.
These challenges stem from the fact that the engineering curriculum has traditionally emphasized teaching content and material while assuming that students can manage their own learning. Numerous efforts have been made to teach students to be more effective learners, mostly in the format of extracurricular seminars, and learning-how-to-learn courses. Although these interventions hold the potential to introduce effective learning strategies and mindsets to students, they often are non-discipline specific, lack scaffolding, and are aimed at providing information more than providing practice opportunities for new learning strategies. Thus, some challenges remain: First, because the learning strategies were taught in non-discipline-specific context, students often have difficulty applying the learning strategies in their course learning context, especially for those who require high competency in discipline knowledge, such as concept mapping. Second, such extracurricular programs have limited access to students: high-performance students often see these programs as remedial and do not think they will need to improve their learning even in fact they could also benefit from better learning strategies, and lower-performing students may have difficulty finding extra time to participate in these programs when they already struggle with course work.
Thus, a course-integrated scaffolded learning strategies intervention approach is needed to provide students with the opportunity to learn the learning strategies in context and receive feedback from experts who have knowledge on both learning strategies and the discipline. In the pilot study discussed in this paper, a course-integrated learning strategy training was designed and implemented in a foundational mechanical engineering class - solid mechanics. Grounded upon well-established Self-regulated Learning literature, we aim to cultivate a growth mindset, train the students to select appropriate learning strategies based on learning context, and practice metacognitive regulation of their own learning. By teaching learning strategies in context with concrete examples and opportunities to exercise, we hypothesize that students will be more proficient to use the learning strategies and perform more effective self-regulation. Scaffolding as a part of the learning process will enable students to exercise individual learning strategies, practice metacognition, and formulate a learning plan as self-regulated learners.

On the operational level, we adopted the Knowledge- Belief- Commitment - Planning (KBCP) framework, using various intervention formats (lectures, examples, assignments, reflections, feedback) to scaffold students’ learning behavior changes. These interventions aim to provide students with a deeper understanding of what learning is about, how learning occurs, tools for successful learning, and cultivate a growth mindset towards learning. The intervention was implemented in a sophomore-level mechanical engineering class of 129 engineering students. Participation in the activities was voluntary and students were given small extra credits.

We use mixed methods to understand how the learning strategy intervention impacts students’ self-reported growth mindset, confidence, and knowledge about using effective learning strategies, the learning strategies students use before and after the intervention. We also examined the exam performance across different groups: students' various levels of participation, from various demographics backgrounds, and how their exam performance changed or not before and after the intervention.