TEACHING NON-MAJOR STUDENTS ELECTRICAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

In recent years, many students in majors other than engineering or science have been expected to take a Science, Technology and Society (STS) course, or the equivalent, to satisfy a component of their general education requirement. Ideally, the STS requirement helps students learn how culture interacts with science and technology, through influences in both directions. In the process, non-major students can also gain appreciation for essential concepts, controversies and current areas of exploration, while developing increased technological literacy for critiquing scientific or technological claims in presentations of various forms. Teaching an STS course, however, requires a very different pedagogical approach than a faculty member may use for a traditional engineering course. Rather than an emphasis on rigorous quantitative problem solving or project planning, non-major students benefit much more from an approach that provides sufficient historical context and biographical details of explorers and their contributions. The instructor should effectively guide discussions on key questions related to selected readings or video presentations, utilize classroom demonstrations to illustrate key concepts, and assign certain mini experiments or projects that help students get a hands on feel for how things work. Evaluation techniques should fit the course audience. While matching and multiple choice test questions can assess students learning at the lower levels of the New Bloom's Taxonomy related to remembering names, contributions and terminology or understanding concepts correctly, assigning one or more thesis driven papers can serve to assess students' progress in the upper levels of thinking from analyzing and applying to evaluating and creating. This paper illustrates choices made by the author in teaching a non-majors course involving electrical science and technology at Messiah College over the past several years, including samples of assessments measuring student outcomes with the above techniques. The author recommends teaching such an interdisciplinary course for non-majors not only for the pleasure of the experience, but also for the benefits of expanded scholarship that result, both for the students and the faculty member, in the form of newly established interdisciplinary connections. Such connections include understanding diverse viewpoints on technology, recognizing how one fits in the process of developing and guiding technology for society as a whole, and bringing the broader background of biographical and historical precedent into the classroom of the standard engineering curriculum. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future work.