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Allen, and Farrokh Mistree Georgia Institute of Technology  \nAbstract: Learning engineering design requires more than simply having design experiences. Design experiences provide a context for students to practice design skills and an opportunity for students to learn deep lessons about the nature of engineering design. Reflection on the experiences is necessary in order to recognize and realize these lessons. Student questions like“Why do we have to do so much paperwork” and “When are we going to get to the real design work of building” indicate when students are not taking the time to understand the lessons that are afforded by the design experience. We believe that the writing of learning essays can help students expand and enhance the lessons that they are learning from design experiences and, as a result, we have been using them in our design classes for over ten years. Learning essays are short, structured compositions in which students explore the lessons they have learned from experiences. Because of student difficulties selecting topics, structuring the essays, and understanding the role of the activity, not all students benefit as they could. Additionally, the overhead associated with the submission, grading, distribution of help, and management of the activity in the classroom creates problems for both students and instructors. In response to these difficulties, we have designed and developed the Reflective Learner, an electronic environment that supports and facilitates the learning essay writing activity. Students write their essays in the environment. The environment keeps track of the essays as well as provide several forms of support designed to address the student problems. Instructors can define essay assignments and grade submitted essays in the environment. In this paper, we describe the environment and present some findings from a formative evaluation during the 1996-1997 academic year.  \n1. THE ROLE OF REFLECTION AND LEARNING ESSAYS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN  \nIn commenting on the state of engineering education, Dixon recently warned “We often confuse experience with learning, or provide experience without education” and “Experience per se does nothing for designers-or anyone else-unless they learn something cognitive in the process” [1] . Experiences, in the case of engineering design education, provide a context for students to practice design skills and an opportunity for students to learn deep lessons about the nature of engineering design. Student questions like “Why do we have to do so much paperwork” and“When are we going to get to the real design work of building” indicate when students are not taking the time to understand the lessons that are afforded by the design experience. Studies of learning suggest that those students who spend time trying to answer such questions through explanation, abstraction or theorizing tend to perform better on transfer tests of skills and conceptual understanding [2-4] . Such reflection on experience is a cornerstone to many theories of learning from experience [5, 6] and is increasingly recognized as a characteristic of successful practitioners [7-9] . We are looking for ways to help students be more reflective about the engineering design experiences that we provide for them [10] .  \nPage 2.274.1  \nWe are particularly interested in the learning of engineering design skills and concepts through complex design experiences. In our design class, ME3110: Creative Decisions and Design [11], student teams work through a structured design process in order to 1) design and build a complex mechanical artifact and 2) learn general lessons about doing engineering design, working in teams, and learning from experience. In such an environment, students, under pressure to get the work done, may develop a task focus rather tha","cbCaim3qpSas92fA","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaim3qpSas92fA","pdf",94458,"English","# The Role of Reflection and Learning Essays in Engineering Design\n## Engineering experiences as context for design learning\n## Learning essays as structured reflection on design phases\n## Problems affecting essay quality","[{\"question\":\"Why are learning essays necessary in engineering design education?\",\"answer\":\"Design experiences provide context, but students need reflection to recognize and realize the deep lessons of engineering design. Learning essays are designed to help students explore what they learned from those experiences.\"},{\"question\":\"What student issues reduce the effectiveness of learning essays?\",\"answer\":\"Students struggle with choosing appropriate topics, structuring the essays, and understanding the essay’s role and value. Essay management overhead also creates problems for both students and instructors.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the Reflective Learner electronic environment support the activity?\",\"answer\":\"Students write essays within the environment, which tracks submissions and provides forms of support. Instructors can define assignments and grade submitted essays, and the paper reports results from formative evaluation in 1996-1997.\"}]","Learning Essays and the Reflective Learner - Supporting Reflection in Engineering Design Education | PDF",1790087886]