Susan M. Montgomery
University of Michigan
One of the challenges in teaching engineering, or any other discipline, for that matter, is trying to meet the needs of a variety of students. This is a particular challenge in large classes, where the typical teaching mode is heavily dependent on lectures (this need not, of course be the case, but that's another paper...). One way to reach students individually is through the use of educational software. This paper examines the role of educational software, and in particular multimedia-bases software, in meeting the needs of various learners.
A survey of learning styles was conducted in a sophomore-level introductory chemical engineering class with an enrollment of 143 students. Early in the semester one class session was devoted to learning styles. Students used an assessment tool to determine their learning styles, and then we discussed the characteristics of each learning style.
A review of learning style inventories was performed in preparation for the class session. Kolb's Learning Style Inventory [1-3], the Myers-Briggs inventory [4-5], and Soloman's Inventory of Learning Styles [6] were compared and tested with a sample of eight students. They found the questions in the Kolb inventory to be too laden with jargon and hard to answer. The Myers-Briggs inventory's focus on personality rather than learning style diminished it's effectiveness for our purposes. Soloman's inventory consisted of 28 simple questions that the students found very easy to answer. Their responses to these questions helped to classify their learning style along four dimensions (processing, perception, input and understanding), described in Table 1.
The results of the survey of student learning styles are shown in Table 2. They are very similar to those of Felder[7], whose preliminary observations apply:
In this section the features of multimedia-based educational software that address individual learning styles are discussed, with primary emphasis on those learning styles not typically addressed by traditional teaching methods. Four software programs have been developed or are under development for this class: Pressure/Temperature, Multiphase Systems, Mass Balances, and an Encyclopedia of Chemical Engineering Equipment. The Pressure/Temperature module exposes students to the concepts, units and type of equipment used to measure pressure and temperature. The Multiphase Systems module, which covers single and multi-component phase equilibria, integrates videoclips of demonstrations and simple experiments with explanations of phase diagrams. The module also includes images of industrial processes dependent on phase equilibria, such as distillation columns. The Mass Balances module is a multimedia tour of the phosphate coating system of Ford Motor Company's Wixom Assembly Plant. This multimedia tour was used as part of an open-ended project in which students had to generate the flowsheet for the phosphate coating system, then suggest modifications for waste minimization. This open ended problem exposes students to the type of challenges they will face in industry, and motivates them as to the importance of the concepts being explored in class. The Encyclopedia of Chemical Engineering Equipment, still under development, will include image, videoclips, graphics to describe typical equipment used in chemical engineering. Additional modules for the junior level laboratory have also been developed.
During the semester students completed surveys regarding the effectiveness of the Pressure/Temperature and Multiphase Systems modules, as well as a mid-semester course evaluation. The discussion that follows includes preliminary data from these surveys.
Comments are often made about the MTV-generation of students having a short attention span. These comments are validated by the learning style survey data, which showed that 67%of students in the introductory class were active learners, whose preferred learning environment is one in which they are actively participating. Discovery is a very important part of the educational process [9] and is easily achievable through the proper implementation of multimedia. The use of multimedia engages students actively in their learning, and exposes students to the subject matter in exciting ways that traditional learning methods cannot [10,11]. Using multimedia allows students to take an active role in the educational process, in that it frees them from being passive recipients of information [12]. In the Multiphase Systems module, for example, the traditional explanation of phase diagrams is supplemented by a demonstration of low temperature boiling. Students view a movie of a room-temperature boiling experiment and must relate it to the appropriate path in the phase diagram. Active learners perceived movies such as this one as much more useful than did the reflective learners, although this could reflect the fact that they got to actively do something, rather than any increased learning. Other benefits of this type of interaction are discussed later.
Our surveys showed that active learners particularly appreciated the presence of an ``interactor,'' such as MEL, the helpful professor (the name is an acronym for our Multimedia Education Laboratory), who is shown in Figure 1. In a sample screen from the Pressure/Temperature module shown in Figure 2 MEL checks the student's answer to a question about hydrostatic pressure.
