October 15, 2009
News View Article
Novel education tactics earn Pitt professors invitation to inaugural meeting of national educators
Two professors in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering are among 49
young engineering researchers and educators selected to present their
novel approaches to engineering education at the National Academy of
Engineering's (NAE) inaugural Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE)
symposium scheduled for Nov. 15-18 in Herndon, Va.
Mary
Besterfield-Sacre, an associate professor in the Department of
Industrial Engineering and Fulton C. Noss Faculty Fellow, will discuss
her current project to develop a tool for evaluating team-based design
processes and the factors that result in a quality design and
prototype. Besterfield-Sacre has designed several models for evaluating
engineering student learning. In addition, she developed the Pittsburgh
Freshman Engineering Attitudes Survey to measure students' perspectives
of engineering and their confidence to be an engineer. The survey is
widely used in engineering schools to predict which students will
complete engineering programs in good standing.
Joseph McCarthy, an associate professor and William Kepler Whiteford
Faculty Fellow, created a block-scheduled engineering curriculum
intended to increase student motivation and help students understand
the interconnectedness of their discipline. Instead of loading students
with a variety of smaller chemical engineering classes each semester,
McCarthy’s model breaks the discipline into six “pillars”—or main
courses—and presents one pillar per semester as a two-hour class, five
days a week. McCarthy will explain that after seven years in practice,
the expanded class time and integrated laboratory experiences have
resulted in more hands-on student experiences, an increase in student
assessment scores, and fostered better professor-student interaction.
For
more information, contact Pitt News Representative Morgan Kelly at
412-624-4356 (office); 412-897-1400 (cell); mekelly@pitt.edu.
