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.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Intuitors prefer theories and interpretations, which is often what is focused on in engineering courses. Sensors, on the other hand, prefer to deal with actual data and facts. Certainly the best activity for sensors is an actual experience, such as a laboratory, in which they could actually obtain and analyze experimental data, but often it's not possible to provide this experience in a core course, particularly one with a large enrollment. Interactive software that includes a simulation of a real system can play an important role in meeting the needs of sensing learners. Some PC-based non-multimedia interactive simulations for Chemical Engineering instructions developed in part by the author [13], included simulations that were much appreciated by the students. Students in the material and energy balances course had a chance to work with real data as part of their open ended problem: They developed a flowsheet of a 12-stage phosphate coating system with information from the multimedia plant tour mentioned earlier and shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3
The class was fairly evenly divided into sensors and intuitors. In the surveys of the effectiveness of the two computer modules, sensors rated the equation derivations as more useful than did the intuitors. Intuitors probably already understood the derivation of equations from the lecture and the textbook, so they did not need an additional presentation. The sensors, on the other hand, appreciated an additional review of the material. Sensors also ranked the demonstrations as more useful than the intuitive learners did. This result reflects the sensing students' preference for real data and facts rather than theories. The demonstration shown in Figure 1 is a prime example of this type of interaction.
Clearly multimedia software favors visual learners. Images, graphs, animations, movies, schematics and other visual objects greatly enhance the presentation of material, such as in many of the examples previously discussed. In developing multimedia software, one must be particularly aware of the opportunities to improve the presentation through the use of visual clues. For example, in the multiphase module, the student learns how increasing pressure changes the distribution of the vapor and liquid phases in a system. An image of this screen is shown in Figure 4. Note that the increase in pressure is denoted visually as well as verbally, for greater impact. The phase diagram is also colored with shading that indicates the two-phase character of the center region.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Visual students found the movies much more useful than did the verbal learners, as would be expected. They also appreciated the visual navigation scheme, with menu buttons always present on the screen, as in Figure 4.
Assumptions that students who majored in engineering had had previous exposure to the field, and were technically oriented, are no longer valid [14]. In addition, global learners learn best when the technical material is placed in a larger context. The use of multimedia allows us to present this context easily. For example, the Pressure/Temperature module starts with examples of the importance of pressure in various chemical engineering and non-chemical engineering processes, as shown in Figure 5. In addition, global learners can benefit when questions are asked within a larger context, such as in the Multiphase Systems module, where a question about phase diagrams also serves as an introduction to evaporators (Figure 6).
This type of question benefits all students, in that it introduces students to some of the equipment of the chemical engineering field, but it particularly ought to benefit global learners. Anecdotal information indicates that this is indeed true. Unfortunately, our preliminary surveys did not differentiate between different types of questions, so we were unable to explore this issue.
The introduction to chemical engineering equipment is vital. All students must be exposed not only to chemical engineering principles, but also to the chemical engineering profession. One on-going project is the Encyclopedia of Chemical Engineering Equipment, described earlier. A sample screen, shown in Figure 7, illustrates how the textbook images literally come alive when replaced by images of actual chemical engineering equipment. This encyclopedia is envisioned to be used by professors in all core undergraduate courses, to enable all students, not only global learners, to place their new found technical knowledge within the context of the chemical engineering profession.
Figure 7
Multimedia and computer software in general can go a long way to filling in the gaps caused by a dichotomy of learning and teaching styles. In addition, an awareness of the pedagogical needs of various learning styles can result in more effective multimedia software. Future work in the learning study will include refining the surveys to be able to determine with more precision the preferences of each learning style. More detailed personal interviews will also be conducted with representatives of each learning style category. Work will continue in the development of the multimedia modules for chemical engineering and the Encyclopedia.
The author would like to thank Mr. Deveron Sanders, a freshman Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program intern in our laboratory, and Ms. Kim Wicklund, a graduating chemical engineering senior who volunteered on this project, for their assistance recording the survey data.