Empowering Engineering Students to Learn How To Learn

Foundational to our learning-centric paradigm is the notion of mental models. We recognize that students develop mental models that represent their understanding of subject matter. These mental models differ from person to person, especially among people from different engineering disciplines and from different universities. In Fall 2012, we received IRB approval to investigate the impact of individual mental models on the shared (team) mental model (and vice versa), how individual mental models change over the course of a semester and how students with different mental models prepare themselves to learn how to learn in an increasingly wired, interconnected and culturally diverse world. In this paper, we describe the salient features of AME5740 Designing for Open Innovation and our initial findings from the study.