Development of a Scalable Self-Regulation Intervention in Support of Lifelong Learning for First-year Engineering Students

Date
2019-09-18
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Abstract

Lifelong learning is a Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attribute and thus a fundamental component of engineering education, and yet, unlike many core engineering concepts such as thermodynamics or heat transfer, there is no agreed upon approach to teach it to students. This work narrows in on the self-regulation component of lifelong learning and draws on research from the learning sciences, motivation theory, and psychology to develop a scalable intervention for first-year engineering students. Several research-based instructional strategies were modified into four workshops and sets of reminders, each with an emphasis on higher purpose, learning strategies, metacognition, or growth mindset. They were offered to first-year engineering students during the winter term and impact on student performance and beliefs were measured. This thesis presents the details of the workshops, results from their first implementations, two frameworks to evaluate the learning intervention, and suggestions for future work. While this thesis cannot provide conclusive results, it does provide evidence and support that self-regulation can and should be explicitly taught to engineering students.

Description
Keywords
Lifelong learning, Self-regulated learning, Engineering education
Citation
Sullivan, M. (2019). Development of a Scalable Self-Regulation Intervention in Support of Lifelong Learning for First-year Engineering Students (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.