OTREC Events

Friday Transportation Seminar: Sight Distance and Stopping Sight Distance

October 28, 2011 12:00 pm

Room 204 of the Distance Learning Center Wing of the Urban Center on the Portland State University campus. 12pm-1pm.

Speaker: Shane Brown, Washington State University

Topic: Student, Practitioner, and Faculty Context and Understanding of Sight Distance and Stopping Sight Distance

An extensive line of research on conceptual change in cognitive science and engineering education have shown that students do not possess fundamental understandings of engineering, science and mathematics concepts. Conceptual change is a particular kind of learning where the knowledge being learned interacts in a meaningful way with existing knowledge.  A barrier to learning concepts is the presence of misconceptions, or robust misunderstandings that are not easily changed by instruction.  A parallel line of research in situated cognition suggests that knowledge is embedded in a context and the tools and artifacts that are available at the time of knowledge application.  Additionally, for learning to be optimized, content should be taught in the context (e.g. engineering design) in which it will be applied.  Conceptual change and situated cognition combined suggest that current educational practice is not effective in preparing students to have deep understandings of concepts and how they are applied in engineering practice.   Extensive data was gathered on students, engineering practitioners, and faculty understanding of SD and SSD using clinical demonstration interview methods.  Textbooks were analyzed for their context and coverage of SD and SSD.  Students were found to have rich stories from personal experience that related to SD and SSD, but were generally unable to understand the concepts as they related to course material.  Engineer and faculty definitions and applications of SD and SSD were different, mostly in the amount of contextually rich descriptions included.  Textbook presentations of SD and SSD tended to lack the contexts described by the engineers and instead focus on equations and variables.  Results suggest that students are not learning the concepts of SD and SSD in a long-lasting and meaningful way and that the context in which these concepts are learned is much different than the way in which they are used in practice.

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