Evaluating the Effect of a Student-Centered Pedagogical Approach on Students’ Skills and Knowledge in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Course

In traditional Computer-Aided Design (CAD) learning environments, engineering students often learn the design skills and knowledge without requiring any personal input, creativity, or self-reflection. Engineering faculty prepare the CAD exercises, tutorials, or homework and ask students to complete them. Students learn the step-wise procedures in those assignments and mimic their instructor’s design processes. Students do not question their conceptual understanding, self-reflect on their design processes, or critically evaluate their thinking. Students passively learn the procedures. Members of historically underrepresented minority students (URMs) in STEM fields, including female, first generation college, and ethnic minority students, are vulnerable and often at risk in these traditional learning environments.

To promote the STEM pipeline and retain the URMs in engineering education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has realized the need to transform the undergraduate engineering education practices from the teacher-centered and knowledge-oriented pedagogies to student-centered and learner-oriented pedagogies to attract the interest of all students and retain them in higher education. In student-centered and learner-oriented pedagogies, students evaluate their conceptual understanding, self-reflect on their learning and use metacognitive skills. Designing the learning material is an instructional strategy that instructors can use to transform their teaching approaches towards a more student-centered and learner-oriented pedagogical approach.

We received a three-year educational research funding from the NSF to evaluate the use of a student-centered and learner-oriented pedagogy on students’ learning outcomes and experiences in CAD education in undergraduate levels. Mechanical engineering faculty and learning scientists from three different universities worked in collaboration to design and implement a cyberlearning environment in CAD education courses offered at a major Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in US. Our three engineering faculty members, between Fall 2014 and Fall 2019, taught 17 classes. 225 engineering students participated in the study and completed all research instruments.

We asked the research question: “What were the effects of a cyberlearning environment that involved designing and sharing screen-cast tutorials on participating CAD education students’ content understanding, course performance, lifelong learning skills, engineering attitudes, and learning experiences?” We employed a quasi-experimental pre-and-post-test research design to answer the main question. Half of the courses were designated as control group (CC) and the other half as experimental group (EG). In the EG, instructors asked their students to generate CAD screencast tutorials by recording their screen and own audio. Students described their thinking process and recorded their audio as for both directions to follow and self-reflection of the process to explore. Students shared their screen-cast exercise tutorials with their peers in the cyberlearning environment designed by the researchers. The students learned from each other’s screencast tutorial exercise. Next, they provided constructive feedback to their peers. Students’ meta-cognition had been activated; they evaluated their conceptual understanding of the subject; and self-reflected of their learning trajectory. As they designed their tutorials, they searched the Internet, library, and other sources their instructors provided. Control group students were asked to review the teacher-generated screencasts and learn from them.

Study data were collected through administering a life-long learning survey, an engineering attitude survey, an exit project survey, and a CAD modeling exam. Life-long learning and engineering attitude surveys were administered to both groups before and after the semester. Exit survey was administered only to the experimental groups and it included both open-ended and Likert-type items. CAD modeling exam was administered by the end of the semester in both groups.

We run F-tests (ANOVA) and computed the Effect Sizes (ES) to compare group differences. Our findings indicated that students’ content understanding and engineering attitudes developed statistically significant because of their engagement in screen-cast tutorial exercises.