Bridging Engineering and Science Teaching: A Collaborative Effort to Design Instruction for College Students

Reformers seeking to increase student understanding and interest are looking to collaborative partnerships to support improved science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teaching. At the college level, partnerships across colleges are encouraged by reformers in order to provide all students with strong content understanding, model recommended practices for future teachers, and increase participation by underrepresented groups in STEM careers. Collaborative curriculum development, however, is not a trivial undertaking and success is not guaranteed. A better understanding of how partners with different backgrounds interact and what types of instructional changes can be expected from initial attempts will facilitate this potentially powerful approach to instructional change. In this project, 2 engineers and 2 science educators worked jointly to develop a design‐based core engineering course to meet the needs and interests of future engineers and science educators. Interaction among planners and development progress were documented by written meeting records and reflections, emails, and records of planning stages and products. Analysis characterized interactions between engineers and educators and the resulting instructional changes. In spite of a strong interest in partners' topics and mutual goals, specialized language and professional cultural differences presented obstacles to understanding and development progress. Also described are the types of instructional changes reasonable to expect in initial development efforts.     

Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world cyber-physical systems. The key challenge is to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Often, hybrid systems are rather complex in that they require expertise from many domains (e. g., robotics, control systems, computer science, software engineering, and mechanical engineering). Moreover, despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires nontrivial human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is, thus, not uncommon for development and verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (1) graphical (UML) and textual modeling of hybrid systems, (2) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (3) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks.     

The Application of the Engineering Design Process to Curriculum Revision: A Collaborative Approach to STEM Curriculum Refinement in an Urban District

This study describes how student unit assessment data helped support ongoing curriculum revisions in the Baltimore City School District. This project is situated in the STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools (SABES) project, which is a National Science Foundation funded multi‐year Math Science Partnership between the Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore City School District. The project focuses on improving STEM education in grades three through five. The study modeled the process of curriculum revision after the engineering design process. One of the units developed by the partnership was analyzed using this revision process. Areas of unit revision and modification were identified utilizing the analysis of pre‐ and post‐assessment data from the implementation of the unit. Constraints represented by standards, unit objectives, and student‐reading levels further informed the revision process. The process resulted in modifications to aspects of the unit and assessment. Findings from this work will help inform collaborative curriculum initiatives between institutions of higher education public school districts.     

Reforming and Assessing Undergraduate Science Instruction Using Collaborative Action‐Based Research Teams

Faculty members at Purdue University in the departments of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Chemistry conducted a reform effort for the undergraduate curriculum utilizing action‐based research teams. These action‐based research teams developed, implemented, and assessed constructivist approaches to teaching undergraduate science content in each department. This effort utilized a partnership of scientists, science educators, master teachers, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Results indicated that the project partners were able to (a) implement more inquiry‐based teaching that emphasized conceptual understanding, (b) provide opportunities for cooperative learning experiences, (c) use models as an ongoing theme, (d) link concepts and models to real‐world situations, e.g., field trips, (e) provide a more diverse range of assessment strategies, and (f) have students present their understandings in a variety of different forms. Further, we found that we were able to (a) involve graduate and undergraduate students, classroom teachers, scientists, and science educators together to work on the reform in a collaborative manner, (b) bring multiple perspectives for teaching and for science to support instruction and, (c) provide scientists and graduate science students (who will become university professors) with more effective teaching models. We also found that the collaborative action‐based research process was effective for contributing to the reform of undergraduate teaching.     

Using Inquiry to Improve Pedagogy through K‐12/University Partnerships

This article focuses on the impact a collaborative project between university graduate fellows and K‐12 classroom teachers had on improved pedagogy in the classroom and in the future at the university. Nine teams participated in a yearlong professional development project to improve pedagogy and communication skills of the participants. This study shows that the participants, the fellows and the K‐12 teacher partners, made changes in planning, implementation, and even motivation for using inquiry‐based methods in their classroom. External observations of the teams further support the individuals' claims of improved pedagogy using inquiry and impact on student conceptual understanding. The Horizon Classroom Observation instrument was used for these observations. The teams showed an overall increase in scores, as well as overall effective and exemplarily implementation of their planning. The program design, the implementation, and the results of this three‐year study will be elaborated in this article.     

Collaborative Teams in a University Statistics Course: A Case Study of How Differing Value Structures Inhibit Change

In a rapidly changing world, individuals need the intellectual agility, problem‐solving skills, and increased interdependence that are not developed in a traditional classroom. Despite years of reform efforts, little change in practice has been observed. This is a case study of the efforts of a statistics professor who used collaborative learning to prepare his students for the challenges of the 21^st century. The nature of the statistics course, the intentions of the professor, and the interactions and feedback of his students are analyzed in terms of their underlying value structures ( Beck & Cowan, 1996 ). Conflicting expectations and experiences, particularly with assessment, resulted in dissatisfaction and frustrations for the professor and the students.     

基于WSR的水利工程全过程协同管理研究

在水利工程管理当中,从前期决策、勘察设计、建造到运营维护的全过程,引入全过程协同管理,可以产生和助力发挥协同效应.以都江堰工程为例,运用物理-事理-人理方法论(Wuli-Shili-Renli System Approach,以下简称WSR方法论),从物理、事理、人理角度,对协同管理进行系统分析,通过构建基于WSR系统的协同管理三维分析模型、协同管理分析矩阵和协同管理分析框架,为水利工程的协同管理提供启示和借鉴,助力于发挥水利工程协同管理全过程的协同效应.     

STEM Teachers' Planned and Enacted Attempts at Implementing Engineering Design‐Based Instruction

This study investigates grades 5 and 6 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers' planned and actualized engineering design‐based instruction, the instruments used to characterize their efforts, and the implications this work has for teachers' implementations of an integrated approach to STEM education. Participants included 23 STEM teachers from six schools (three rural, two suburban, and one urban). Data were gathered via lesson implementation plans and classroom observations. Teachers demonstrated strength in planning for standards‐ and engineering design‐based lessons, incorporating engineering practices within their respective implementation plans, and aligning their plans with content and design process standards. Missing from their plans was attention to science concepts and their placement, use, and application within a design task. Classroom observations indicated that the teacher participants gave priority to “front loading,” the design process by concentrating more of their instructional time on problem identification and planning and less time on testing designs, communicating performance results, and redesigning. Measures utilized in this study provided insight into the content of teachers' planning and subsequent instruction and suggest potential for capturing content planning in the context of classrooms in which teachers are attempting to integrate novel curriculum, such as the new standards for engineering practices.     

A Technique to Improve the Error Propagation when Integrating Relative Equilibria

We study and perform a way to improve the propagation of errors in the numerical integration of relative equilibria solutions of Hamiltonian differential equations with symmetries. It is well known that in this case and for stable equilibria, the error growth is typically quadratic for general schemes and linear for schemes that preserve the invariant quantities of the problem. Here we present a technique to construct methods whose error propagation in time integration of stable relative equilibria is bounded. Numerical results are presented.     

一种基于支持向量机预测模型的精度提高方法与应用

介绍了支持向量机模型的特点 ,针对该模型在经济预测中的应用 ,提出了一种提高该模型预测精度的方法 ,并进行了理论分析和实际应用的验证 ,说明了该方法能够获得更加准确的预测结果 .