DEVELOPING AND IMPLEMENTING GUIDED INQUIRY MODULES IN A CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS COURSE

摘要

In recent years, leading engineering research and accreditation agencies have called for engineering education to become more reflective of real-world engineering practice. The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) suggests better alignment of engineering curricula and academic experiences with the challenges and opportunities graduates will face in the workplace, emphasizing the importance of student-centered education and student learning outcomes that are focused on performance characteristics needed in future engineers. The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has set standards for engineering curricula to focus on the skills needed to integrate future engineers into the real world. As advised by ABET, higher education programs in the engineering discipline are expected to (1) create opportunities for students to adopt a systems approach capable of considering short and long-term environmental, societal, political, regulatory, and economic issues while identifying, defining, and devising solutions to real-world, open-ended problems; (2) take a research-based, inquiry-based approach to actively engage students in the learning process; and (3) facilitate development of interpersonal skills such as teamwork, technical writing and public speaking to communicate with technical as well as nontechnical audiences. Guided inquiry methods encourage students to apply problem-solving skills, generate and evaluate alternative solutions, periodically assess progress toward the solution, and extract general principles from specific solutions; students can then make sense of new information and regularly assess their own knowledge and skill levels, thus promoting the development of meta-cognitive skills. These methods portray the teacher as a facilitator or guide, providing only the materials and problems for students to investigate and devise their own procedures to solve the problem. From this type of instruction, both student and instructor become critical in the teaching and learning process; a cycle of guidance, problem solving and collaboration that continues among students and between students and instructor that allows greater understanding than traditional lecture and learning.