Restructuring a Design Focused Introductory Transportation Engineering Course: An Exploratory Study using the Threshold Concept Framework

Abstract

Design is an integral part of engineering courses. Addressing design problems is a challenging task in instruction because of the openness and complexity of these problems. This paper presents an approach in addressing these challenges for an introductory transportation-engineering course, an important part of which is highway design. to address the challenges associated with highway design, a framework proposed by the threshold concepts model was used to identify a candidate-concept for the instructional redesign process. Two major characteristics of threshold concepts, integrativity and transformativity were used to identify horizontal alignment candidate-concept for the highway design process. using concept maps generated as guides through the integrativity of learning associated with the horizontal alignment, several adjustments to the structure of lecture materials and project tasks were made. in addition, reflective assessment items were administered after each redesigned instructional task and at the end of the course. Students' answers to these reflective assessments helped identifying trends associated with the transformativity of horizontal alignment in the context of highway design. the analysis of students' reflective assessment indicated that horizontal alignment has the potential to be transformative, and therefore, can be a candidate-concept for the activities associated with scaffolding of highway design process. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2153-5965

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 American Society for Experimental Engineers, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2010

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