Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 703 de 957
may include leading questions. Finally, in the Confirmation stage confirming statements
such as “ok” and “alright” (often by both coach and students) conclude the episode.
Episodes must contain at least two stages. The stages, while central to our episodes
framework, are not the focus of this investigation.
Methods
This paper presents a case study of one team, a subset of a larger investigation of student
learning in virtual laboratories. The undergraduate students were in the 4th or 5th year of
a chemical, biological or environmental engineering program and enrolled in a capstone
laboratory course of approximately 80 total students. The team, of two female students
and one male student, was self-selected and maintained for the entire course. Team
selection criteria for this research are described elsewhere (Gilbuena, Sherrett, &
Koretsky, 2011). One faculty member, the coach, participated in this study and has
coached over 60 teams in the same capstone course over several years. The faculty
member also has many years of thin films processing experience and has developed
several courses on the subject.
The primary data source for this study uses the think aloud protocol, and is comprised of
audio recordings of the team as they “think aloud” while completing the project.
Transcripts of the audio recordings were analysed. For this study, we focus on the initial
coaching session transcript. Two researchers examined the transcript to investigate the
connection between student and instructor objectives by coding the coaching session
transcript; each researcher coded the transcript individually by identifying episodes
within the transcript and labelling the key theme of each episode. After coding, the
researchers compared the coded transcript; major episode topics were agreed upon
almost unanimously and discrepancies were easily resolved. Episode themes were
categorized as follows:
1. Student Objectives - Inputs variables and performance metrics focuses on one of
the reactor input parameters (reactor temperature, pressure, or input flow rates)
or one of the project performance metrics (wafer uniformity, gas utilization, or
project budget).
2. Instructor Objectives - Core content and concepts refers to topics from previous
courses (e.g., material balance, reaction kinetics, statistics, project management,
writing).
3. Project contextualization emphasizes the authentic context of the project which
situates it in industrial practice. For example, an episode in this category might
contain discussion of the typical discussion between engineers with operators in a
processing facility.
Themes in the second category were member checked with the coach. A graphical
representation of coaching session episodes’ length and chronological order was prepared
based on this categorization.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011