Looking Beyond Content: Skill Development for Engineers

By Edward F. Redish, Karl A. Smith. 2008

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an emerging theory of thinking and learning built on results in the neural, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. We outline this framework and consider some of its implications, such as developing a more detailed understanding of the specific skill of using mathematics in modeling physical situations. This approach provides theoretical underpinnings for some best‐practice instructional methods designed to help students develop this skill and provides guidance for further research in the area.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Education, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f09f9293e0da638c958ee8a6a5a6fb62cc3fbeb9

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Andrew Elby

In Education

Citations in the corpus

Engineering Students’ Perceptions of Soft Skills, Industry Expectations, and Career Aspirations (2016, background): “This follows from the idea that the global engineer is no longer merely a technical person but a professional team player with high technical expertise (Redish and Smith 2008).”
How students blend conceptual and formal mathematical reasoning in solving physics problems (2011, background): “…on expert problem solving and resulting instructional strategies emphasize an initial conceptual reasoning phase As a central feature of their professional practice, scientists apply domain-specific knowledge to solve quantitative problems (Redish & Smith, 2008; Reif, 2008; Reif & Heller, 1982).”