Session F2C 0-7803-6424-4/00/$10.00 © 2000 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2000 Kansas City, MO 30 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-19 PREPARING FOR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE: COURSE EVALUATION AND IMPLICATIONS Jennifer Turns 1 , Cynthia J. Atman 2 , and Fred Mannering 3 1 Jennifer Turns, Univ. of WA, Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, 225 Engr Annex, Seattle, WA, 98195-2180, jturns@engr.washington.edu 2 Cynthia J. Atman, Univ. of WA, Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, 223 Engr Annex, Seattle, WA, 98195-2180, atman@engr.washington.edu 3 Fred Mannering, Univ. of Washington, Dept of Civil and Envr Engineering, 201C More Hall, Seattle, WA, 98195-2180, flm@u.washington.edu Abstract: One goal of engineering schools is to prepare students to become engineering practitioners. At the University of Washington, we have been conducting a variety of research projects devoted to the concurrent goals of (a) articulating what it means to be preparing students to become an engineering practitioner, (b) assessing students preparedness for being an engineering practitioner, and (c) designing and evaluating activities that promote student preparation in areas potentially overlooked in traditional curricula. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of a two-credit course designed during the summer of 1999 and taught during the fall of 1999. In particular, we describe the motivations behind the course design, the primary components of the course design, and the outcome of an empirical and extensive student-based evaluation of the course. In addition, we discuss the possible implications of the evaluation results. Index Terms – Professional Practice, Classroom Activities, Reflective Writing, Guest Lecturers, Ethics PREPARING FOR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE A growing concern that engineering graduates are not currently as prepared as they should be, documented in recent reports on the state of engineering education, has led to a variety of curricular reform efforts in the engineering education community (NRC, 1995; NSF, 1995). For example, researchers are exploring strategies for understanding student approaches to engineering design and for teaching design better (e.g., Radcliffe and Lee, 1989; Atman, Chimka et al., 1998). In this paper, our focus is on learning how we can enhance current programs in order to explicitly help students become better prepared as professional engineering practitioners. Images of the professional engineering practitioner can come from a variety of sources. For example, the contents of the professional engineer licensing exam, the "PE" exam, provide insight into the types of technical problems that society expects a particular type of engineer to be able to solve (Young, 1994; Young, 1996). Another image stems from the collection of skills and knowledge that are part of the new ABET accreditation criteria (ABET, 1997). We are investigating another perspective – thinking about a professional engineering practitioner as an expert problem solver. As a result, we have been looking into the literature to determine what contributes to problem solving expertise (Chi, Feltovich et al., 1981; Chi, Glaser et al., 1988; Ortega, 1989). There, we find at least three contributing factors. First, expert problem solvers organize their knowledge differently than novices do. Second, experts often rely on extensive knowledge of context. Finally, experts often draw upon cases when solving problems. These ideas are currently guiding us as we explore research targeted toward student preparedness for professional practice. In this paper, we focus on one area of research - the design and evaluation of instructional activities that can enhance student preparedness. Specifically we report on the design and evaluation of a civil engineering professional preparation course that we taught in the fall of 1999. The paper begins with a description of the course and the evaluation approach. We then present the results of the evaluation, covering the eleven topics and the three primary instructional strategies of the course. Based on these results, we suggest some general implications for course redesign. OUR COURSE The course we taught was in civil engineering. Table 1 provides an overview of the course. The course had two emphases – providing students with an opportunity to learn about the elements of professional civil engineering practice and providing opportunities to help students restructuring their disciplinary, professional knowledge base. We developed the course by identifying (1) topics that would be associated with each class emphasis, (2) instructional strategies that would be used, and finally (3) class design constraints (e.g., such as the requirement that the class meet on Monday for 2 hours). Examples of the topics and instructional strategies are shown in Table I. The final course design represents a merging of these three considerations. Concerning the elements of civil engineering practice, it is clear in civil engineering that professional practice requires more than knowledge about structural theory, environmental theory, and other such technical and scientific areas. For a practicing civil engineer, knowledge about contracts, about the processes of getting civil engineering work, about ethics, about quality assurance and about legal issues are all very important. These were the types of