Work-in-Progress: Collaborative and Reflective Learning in Engineering Programs

The importance of well developed team-working skills as well as reflective or metacognitive skills among engineering graduates is widely recognized. Many undergraduate engineering programs, as well as K-12 programs, have introduced a number of activities throughout the curriculum, ranging from a variety of team projects to the requirement of maintenance of portfolios of a student’s work as he/she goes through the program, to develop both sets of skills. At the same time, there has been a heated debate between some researchers who have developed these approaches on the one hand and others who have focused on knowledge-centered approaches on the other hand about the relative merits of these two sets of approaches. What has been missing is a suitable way to integrate knowledge-centered considerations and collaborative/reflectioncentered considerations, with the focus shifting from one to the other as needed. In this paper, the author presents an innovative way of achieving such an integration. The paper situates the work within the how people learn framework1,2.