An Essay on Empowering STEM Graduate Students Through Purpose Driven Coursework

7/28/2019 An Essay on Empowering STEM Graduate Students Through Purpose Driven Coursework

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An Essay on Empowering STEM Graduate Students Through Purpose Driven Coursework

Matthew Klein [email protected] 4/15/13

Imagine for a moment the feeling one may have after leading a tight-knit team of engineers

through the design, build, and testing of two formula-style hybrid-electric racing vehicles for the

SAE Formula Hybrid competition that achieved competition finishes over a two year span of 3rd, 2nd,

4th and 1st place while competing against 30 other highly ranked universities from around the

world. Now, imagine how much better the feeling would be if you were then able to continue to

work with two of those engineers at a startup company in Silicon Valley to aid in the developmentof a 150 mph electric racecar and lead them through the ground-up development of a 150 mile

range fully electric, road worthy, prototype vehicle? One might say that this was the start of a

successful career for a young engineer. Finally, imagine the painful fall from that to the utter

unknown and disorganized state a new graduate student is all too commonly found in when

initially navigating their way through their courses and finding the right research project. That

engineer was me, and I must say that the transition from being so directly involved in such highly

innovative environments to experiencing the disappointment of moving back to the place that was

intended to prepare one to create the futures greatest innovations was extremely frustrating and

painful. That story was intended to highlight the fact that some of educations most talented

individuals are slamming into a massive problem when they enter graduate school. My coreproblem in STEM graduate programs is the lack of purposeful continuity in the overarching goal of

the educational curriculum. Here a vision of a new unified structure for departmental curriculum is

discussed with the key objective of aiding in maximizing the output of value-creating STEM

graduates that are truly empowered to solve our modern societys most challenging problems.

To shed light on the reasoning behind my vision presented here I will start with describing the

new graduate students mind set, as understanding what motivates students to apply for STEM

graduate programs is important. During casual interviews with my engineering peers, a common

answer recurred time and time again centering on one wanting to gain both advanced knowledge

and skills to serve a beneficialpurpose to society. Most of those same peers share the identical core

frustration that I feel, in that the course work should be intended to provide both the knowledge ina particular topic as well as aiding in developing the necessary skills to become a successful

researcher in a unified manner. By integrating these two ideas it naturally provides the students

the purpose to learn and understand the knowledge they will need to create innovative results.

In my experience it is far more common that the objective of a course is to give the knowledge

to a student to allow for them to solve X problem in Y topic, while the development of the general

research skills needed to succeed in the increasingly multidisciplinary research environment is left

for students to purely stumble upon on their own. This method is completely counterintuitive to

the purpose of education in the first place, highly inefficient, and the cause for undue frustration on

both the professors and students. I have given much thought to the development of a common class

structure modeled as microcosms of the research environment, with the overarching goal of

providing a guided environment where the students iteratively become better at answering

research questions, while building their knowledge base in a chosen area.

A graphical representation of the iterative problem-solving process, with which the vast

majority of research and development is fundamentally based upon, is shown in Figure 1. Based on

this logic, I propose that there is great value in creating an educational curriculum that serves as a


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microcosm to real world problem solving. This process may be scaled down to a single course or

even a series of connected courses, preparing the students to then apply it to their larger research

problems and beyond. For example, in a project-based course one may imagine a series of purpose-

driven homework assignments (blue loops), with a mid-term project integrating all knowledge

learned to that point (red loop). Following that, more elementary level assignments could be

assigned (second set of blue loops), with a final project linking all knowledge together at the end(grey loop). This process may be applies to all fields and may be scaled for the particular course.

The scalability of project- (or interactive-) based courses is seen in many sources.1,2 Additionally,

with modern computer power and widely available simulation-based projects, this educational

process can be both a feasible and viable tool for enabling project-based learning. For example,

many recent textbooks have been written based on using simulation tools as a means of building

deeper concept understanding.3

Figure 1 - The iterative project-based course process (IPC).

Project-based courses have for many years proven themselves as an excellent tool for teaching.

For example, Professor Ed Carryers Smart Product Design course series at Stanford University has

spawned graduate students credited with participation in many breakthrough innovations, such as

Apples iPod and iPhone products.4 Professor Carryer describes his courses with one simple word,

empowering, and this so clearly explains the result of courses such as these in that they give

students the abilities to leap fearlessly into the development of some of the most amazingly popular

innovations of our time.5 Additionally, these types of courses are valuable to either industry,

government or academic bound MS/PhD students alike.6

In reality, project-based courses tend to pose a challenge for the instructor from a time demand

perspective due to an increased need for direct student interaction. This problem can be creatively

solved such that it may actually reduce the total time investment needs by minimizing lecture

1JK Knight and WB Wood, Teaching More by Lecturing Less, Cell Biology Education (2005 Winter): 298-

310.2 RJ Freuler, MJ Hoffmann, TP Pavlic, JM Beams, JP Radigan, PK Dutta, JT Demel, and ED Justen, Experiences

with a comprehensive freshman hands-on course designing, building, and testing small autonomous

robots, In Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference &

Exposition, 2003.3 CS Chin, Computer-Aided Control Systems Design: Practical Applications Using MATLAB and Simulink, (CRC

Press, 2012).4 T Wagner, Creating Innovators, (New York: Scribner, 2012), 43-46.5 T Wagner, Creating Innovators, (New York: Scribner, 2012), 48-50.6 T Wagner, Creating Innovators, (New York: Scribner, 2012), 50.


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preparation time. Here an inverse process could be used for a course structure where all lecture

material is provided via pre-recorded web-based courses and what would have been actual lecture

time is now used as student-professor interaction time for collaborative group-based project work.

This process is commonly called flipping and has been applied even at the high school level with

great success.7 Additionally, from my own teaching experience as a TA, my favorite and highest-

rated courses were ones where the majority of my time was spent leading lab sections andfacilitating hands-on based learning.

A teaching style that would work well here is defined well by Graham Gibbs in which he

describes a more optimal role for a professor as one of a manager-of-learning rather than one who

acts as an authority in the subject material.8 He argues that the management style actually has as

its goal the maximization of understanding of the material, whereas the authoritative lecturer

supplies only a, possibly rigged, appearance of authority in the subject matter. Again the Iterative

Project-based Course process is well suited to this more relaxed approach by allowing the students

to make discoveries on their own in a collaborative environmentcreated by the manager.

The vision presented here focuses on the development of a highly interactive project-basedcourse environment that uses an iterative learning process, with the core goal being the

development of both particular subject knowledge understanding as well as a shared goal

throughout the entire curriculum of developing purpose-driven research skills necessary for

graduate student success in highly innovative multidisciplinary research. This creates an

environment where hands-on instructor guidance is invested initially to better prepare students for

success while working independently on their own research projects. Finally, making use of the

flipped course style could aid in allowing for the necessary student-instructor interaction time

without burdening professors with increased time investment. The impact of this vision is based

on the idea that by focusing on empowering our young STEM-researchers in actually performing

innovative research, society as a whole will enjoy an economic benefit. The rationale is based onthe fact that in all prior applications of similar methods to this iterative process reviewed during

my research, the results were outstanding and feasibly integrated. A key requirement here is in

motivating faculty to truly want to play a lead role in producing the highest quality, purpose-driven

researchers.

7H Gavan, Teacher uses YouTube as tool, (Beloit Daily News, 12/26/12),

http://www.beloitdailynews.com/news/teacher-uses-youtube-as-tool/article_9a29e426-4f71-11e2-970c-

0019bb2963f4.html. Accessed on 4/15/13.8 G Gibbs, Twenty Terrible Reasons for Lecturing, SCEDSIP Occasional Paper No. 8 (Birmingham, SCED

Publications), 1981.
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An Essay on Empowering STEM Graduate Students Through Purpose Driven Coursework

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