Author: amyhermundstad

Now that we have been thinking about memory, it is interesting to think about how we apply things that we know to different situations. This is known as transfer.

Transfer of information can occur in a couple of different ways. Information that was learned previously can be transferred to new settings, we can transfer what we learn in a classroom to things in our daily life such as work, and we can transfer new ideas to new situations.

There are several necessary components that help when transferring information from one context to another:

1. For transfer to occur, there needs to be a certain amount of initial learning that has already happened. In other words, to be able to transfer information to a new context, there needs to be a certain amount of existing information that can be transferred.
2. New learning is based on previous learning, experiences, memories, etc. When we learn new things, we relate that information to our previous learning and experiences.
3. Information that is more abstract (less specific to a certain context) can help facilitate the transfer of information to new contexts.
4. Transfer is a process. It takes time and intentionality and it can be challenging.

So what can educators do to facilitate transfer for our students? Well, we can try to explicitly connect what students are learning with what they previously learned. We can teach students more abstract concepts as opposed to specific, highly contextualized concepts. We can give students time to transfer that information to the new setting. And we can gauge students prior learning to help them correct any misconceptions or help them make new connections.

For more information, check out these resources:

• Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How people learn.
• Simons, P. R. J. (1999). Transfer of learning: Paradoxes for learners. International Journal of Educational Research, 31(7), 577-589.

There are many times when my memory seems to have failed me. Sometimes I walk into a room and don’t remember why I went into the room. Some days I can’t remember what I did the previous day. Sometimes I just block things from my memory and other times I wish I could block things from my memory but seem unable to do so. And sometimes I get the wrong idea in my head and it just sticks there.

Memory is a very interesting thing. It can be so helpful, but it can also be problematic at times too.

There are three different types of memory: semantic memory, episodic memory, and procedural memory. Episodic memory is memory related to experiences that we have had, semantic memory is the memory of facts and information about the world, and procedural memory is the memory of how to do things.

Memories get stored and we can later recall our memories, bring that information back up in a conversation, and sometimes we can even forget our memories.

So how do things get stored in long-term memory? First, information is encoded, meaning it is registered. This information is then stored for a period of time and can be retrieved at a later date.

But there are many different things that can affect our memory.

When information is first encoded, it may be related to other information that is already stored in memory. For example, when encoding information, I might explain the information in a way that makes sense to me and that is related to my prior experience and memory. But those connections may not necessarily be correct.

When information is stored, we may have problems recalling that information at a later time, especially in a different context. We have all experienced the lapse in memory when we go to say someone’s name (even if it is someone we know well), and their name just sits on the tip of our tongue without us being able to recall their name. The name usually comes back to us at some point, but there still is that period of time where we can’t remember the name.

And if we repeat things enough, we can sometimes develop misconceptions about a topic or idea. This video is an interesting demonstration of this idea.

Students are asked why we have seasons. Students give a variety of explanations based on their past experiences and through incorporating new information with existing information. However, when we tell ourselves these explanations over and over again, they can become ingrained and stored in our memory. Even if these ideas are not correct. And then these ideas become harder to correct the more they are enforced.

These challenges with memory can cause problems and frustrations for students. So how can we help correct any misconceptions and help students store accurate information in their long-term memory?

Here are a few tips:

• First, find out what students know or believe at the beginning of a class/unit/week/day. This will help the instructor understand what students may be having a hard time with or what the students may have misconceptions about.
• Have students connect the new knowledge to previous knowledge (warning! You don’t want students connecting new knowledge to incorrect existing knowledge. That is why it is so important to try to understand what students know about a topic in the beginning).
• Have students reiterate what they learned at the end of each class period, and start out the next class period with a brief review.

For more information, check out these resources:

• Matlin, M. Chapter 8: General knowledge. In Cognition (7th ed., pp. 239–285). Wiley: Hoboken,
  NJ.
•  Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American psychologist, 54(3), 182.
• Tulving, E. (1984). How many memory systems are there? American Psychologist, 40, 385– 398.

In the previous post, Where am I going? (Part 1), I mention automaticity and some of the challenges that come when students (or any of us) are on autopilot. But is automaticity all bad?

In a word, no.

Automaticity can be a negative thing in education when students go through the motions without thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it. But automaticity can also help students focus on specific parts or more challenging aspects of a problem. In general, this automatic processing for a particular task doesn’t require an individual’s attention, doesn’t need the individual’s effort to do it, and is processed quickly. So if students can do some things automatically, they can focus their attention on other parts of the problem.

Let’s think about an example.

When I first learned how to ride a bike, I was not focused on the rules of the road and how to ride on the road with cars and not get hit (in fact I was very far away from any cars and roads and people). All I was focused on was how to not fall over. And that took a long time for me to get to the point where I didn’t fall. But once riding a bike was automatic, I could focus on other things like riding my bike to my friend’s house and figuring out the best route to get there. I didn’t have to focus on not falling over (usually) and I could focus on riding with traffic, obeying traffic laws, and other things that you should do when riding a bike. But I had to practice riding a bike first.

The same is true in educational settings. Students often need to practice simpler problems before we throw all the complexities at the student. But once some things are automatic, students can focus their efforts and attention on more challenging aspects of a problem.

Let’s think about a few more examples related to the education of engineering students.

• When students have mastered topics such as algebra, they can focus their attentional resources in their upper-level math and engineering courses on the material that is specific to that class (be it differential equations, dynamics, design courses, etc.). This automaticity with the math concepts can help students focus their attention on other material which could help them develop expertise in these other topics.
• In some situations, engineering students participate in design classes early on in their engineering education. These early design classes can give students opportunities to practice using a design process (identifying requirements, evaluating alternatives, researching information, etc.) that makes them familiar with the design process. Then in future design classes (or once the students begin working as engineers during internships or after graduation), students are already familiar with the design process and can focus their attention on other aspects of their work or project.

Practice can help students develop automaticity. Practice can help students be more efficient in what they do, can result in a shift in how students approach problems, and can help students be more knowledgeable about a topic which requires less attention to solve problems related to that topic. That is often why we have students practice things multiple times. This helps it stick, helps it get to a point where it requires less processing.

So automaticity can be a good thing if it is something that students have gained a lot of practice with and that allows those students to focus their attention and efforts on specific parts or more challenging aspects of the problem. However, as mentioned in the previous blog post, automaticity can be a bad thing if students go through problems and courses automatically without understanding what they are doing and without gaining expertise with that topic.

Here are a few suggestions to help students use their automatic processing to solve new and different problems without letting students use that automaticity to avoid thinking about difficult problems.

• Have students explain what they are doing and why. This could help students better understand their own processing (whether it is automatic or not), and helps make that processing more explicit to both the student and the instructor.
• Have students summarize key steps in a process, key ideas in a paper, key points in a chapter, etc.
• Explain various aspects of a process being taught to students instead of just listing steps in the process.

Many times, I find myself on autopilot; just going through the motions without really thinking about what I am doing.

Automaticity, while there currently is not consensus about the exact meaning of the term, is this idea of processing information with little to no attention (Moors & De Houwer, 2006) – it is this idea of autopilot. We have probably all experienced this in our daily lives: we drive home after work instead of driving to the grocery store, we read something – a news article, a book – and have no idea what we read at the end.

Another place where we can see this automaticity is in the classroom. Students (myself included) can end up just going through the motions, following a script, without thinking about what we are really doing. Have you ever read something, gotten to the end of a paragraph or section, and realized that you have no idea what you read? Because I have. And students can do that too. Just going through the motions.

Another place where I have seen this “just going through the motions” is in students’ problem-solving. Novice engineering students, when solving problems, may just follow a series of steps because that was what was presented to them. Instead, we want students to be problem-solvers, not just recipe followers.

Let me give you an example. For solving statics problems, the statics for dummies cheat sheet (here) lists just a few necessary steps:

1. Set up a free body diagram for the whole system
2. Write equilibrium equations for the support reactions
3. Write equilibrium equations for the internal forces
4. Solve for the unknowns

Seems simple enough, right? But when students follow these steps, do they really understand the different forces that are at play or are they just going through the motions? Do they understand how to represent the free-body diagram and represent relevant forces? It may be hard to tell.

In addition to automatically following a set of steps to solve a textbook problem which has a defined answer, students can act automatically when solving ill-defined problems too. When solving these ill-defined problems, students often move through the problem formulation and idea generation phases quickly and move on to picking the best idea. With these ill-defined problems, it can be challenging to get students to really focus on the complexity of problems and the variety of possible solutions.

However, we want students to be able to solve a wide variety of problems and to be able to transfer the information that they learned in one context to another context. [For a more information about transfer, look here: Where do I go from here?]

To help students avoid falling into this trap of automatically going through the steps, here are a few strategies that can help.

• Have students summarize what they read. Having students write a summary, even a really short summary, can help students avoid just going through the motions when reading a textbook or article.
• Have students explain how they solved a problem. Teachers can ask students to both solve a textbook problem numerically and write an explanation for how they solved the problem. This can help the teacher identify if students are just following a series of steps exactly as they were presented, of if students are identifying the various nuances in the problem.
• Have students solve a variety of problems that don’t necessarily look the same (but use the same principles)
• For ill-structured problems: Have students identify the problem components, constraints, and criteria
• For ill-structured problems: Have students generate multiple possible solutions
• Give students cases or problems that differ in some meaningful way and have students compare the cases.

For more information, check out these resources:

• Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an instance theory of automatization. Psychological review, 95(4), 492.
• Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological bulletin, 132(2), 297.
• Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological review, 84(1), 1.
• Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological review, 84(2), 127.

I’m struggling to put into words all that I learned during my recent visit to Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy to learn about higher education. But I will try to highlight some of the lasting lessons that I took away.

I’m a pretty quiet person to begin with, and when I travel, I am even quieter. I try to blend in and not stand out in new places. I prefer to observe what is going on around me as I try to learn about the local community and the cultures and lifestyles of those around me. And on this particular trip, I had the opportunity to not just observe, but to hear the stories of those who lived in the places I was visiting and learning about.

As a group of 15 from Virginia Tech, we learned about universities, research, teaching, international programs, PhD programs, and social responsibility (among other things). But it was through conversations with the students who attended these universities and those who worked at the universities that I really got a feel for the university and the community.

I learned about work life balance at the University of Zurich. I learned that graduate students, post-docs, and faculty are interested in transferrable skills such as academic writing and self-management skills. At Uni Basel, I learned about the ways that the university welcomes new and prospective students. I learned about the transition from school to work and the challenges that students face in this transition at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. At the University of Strasbourg, I learned about teaching as a graduate student, and the benefits and challenges that come with that. At Politecnico di Milano, I learned about research that took/will take students all over the world. And I learned a little bit about politics too. And in Lugano, I learned about seeing the world, following unexpected dreams, and cooking.

When traveling to a new country, I try to blend in and observe what is around me so that I am not drastically altering the way people act around me and act towards me. But that has to be balanced with a willingness to be open to new experiences and ideas. During my trip to Europe to learn about higher education in other contexts, I found that I learned the most about universities and life in general by asking a few questions and then just listening to people’s stories.

Thank you Michelle, Christine, Erich, Jonas, Josephine, Natasa, Alberto, Lucy and all those who shared a part of their story!

We left DC at 8:30 pm and arrived in Iceland 6 hours later (6:30 am local time). We had reserved a rental car at the airport so we groggily made our way to the rental car counters. But there was no counter for Thrifty rental car. Just a bored looking teenager holding a (barely visible) sign with our name on it. Not sure what to expect, we followed this young chap to the shuttle and off we went to a building next to the airport with a Thrifty/Dollar car rental sign above the door. This looked perfect. We signed the forms, declined car insurance (more on this later), and set off in a brand new Mazda 2 (100 km on the odometer!). 

We made our way towards Reykjavik where we planned to spend the morning, going to a cafe, seeing the sights, and exploring. So we parked our car near a cafe and decided to go from there. But we had forgotten that it was Sunday morning and  everything was closed. We finally found a cafe that was open on Laugavegur (we later found out that Laugavegur is one of the oldest shopping streets in Iceland), had some coffee, an Icelandic donut (kleinur), and grilled ham and cheese croissant. 

Shortly after eating, we met a new puffin friend called Leif near Hallgrimskirkja and his friend Leifer Eriksson. 

  
We walked around Hallgrimskirkja, walked through a sculpture garden with very, um, interesting sculptures, looked at the Viking boat sculpture, and headed to the harbor in preparation for our puffin cruise. 

The puffin cruise was cold and wet and fantastic! The boat took us out to puffin island (Lundey) and we saw so many puffins!

While on the way back from puffin island, we saw a Viking ship  docked in the harbor and we were told that it was making its way from Norway to the USA. So naturally we had to go check it out. We ran (yes, we sprinted in excitement) to where the boat was docked only to discover that we were just in time to walk around the Draken Harald Hårfagre and chat with the Vikings. 

After chatting with the Vikings, we parted ways and began our journey on the Golden Circle. The first stop was  Þingvellir, which was the location of the first outdoor parliament in Iceland around 930 AD where Iceland was founded as a country. This is also where there is a rift between the American and European continental shelves.     

From there, we headed towards towards Geysir. It was a long drive (probably at least an hour) so naturally I fell asleep in the car.  When I woke up, I immediately saw a sign for ice cream and we had to stop. The place was a fun little farm that made ice cream on site. We each got a giant ice cream cone and ate our ice cream with the cows. We are just living the dream. 

  
It was getting late and we still had so much to do. So we continued on to Geysir. We got to see the geysir erupt several times. While everyone else was poised waiting for the perfect photo, we were just enjoying the area. Someone standing next to us asked us if we didn’t have a camera since we weren’t taking photos. We explained that we were just watching, so they said that they would send us their video of the geysir. Best of both worlds!

Our third stop on the golden circle was Gullfoss, which was absolutely beautiful. It is one of the most magical places. It is three levels of waterfalls the last of which seems to disappear into the earth.  These pictures pretty much sum it up. 

The day was coming to an end so we started to make our way to Garður where we were staying. We were already several hours late, but we passed by Kerið, a 6500 year old crater, and had to stop. We ran up, took some photos, and had to be on our way. 

We got to our bed and breakfast at 9pm said hello to our host, and asked if there was anywhere we could get dinner. Our host Disa recommended Duus in Keflavik. We got there and decided to try some of the local fare. We ordered shark and whale (I’m sorry, grandma). When the waitress brought us our food, she wished us luck (never a good sign).  The shark came in a little cup with two shots of unknown liquid. Apparently we were supposed to eat the shark and chase it with the shot (Gary had to ask because we didn’t know what to do). It was…an experience. We finally got back to the B&B and crashed. 

We got up bright and early the next morning at 4 am so we could catch our flight to Munich. We ate a quick breakfast of things Gary found in the refrigerator and decided should go on toast (butter, cheese, salami, and cucumbers with a side of red peppers). We filled up the car with very expensive gas and went to return the car. We were loading our bags into the shuttle when the rental car person came over to us looking very concerned. There were two scratches in the side of the car and we were told that they were going to have to put a hold on my credit card (remember earlier when I said we declined car insurance through the the rental car company?) I was almost in tears, and level headed Gary went over to the car to investigate further. With a little bit of spit and tears and elbow grease, we found out that it wasn’t actually a scratch, just a smudge. We were released from the rental car holding area and made our way to the airport!

Thank you Iceland for the spectacular adventure! See you again soon!

It is Friday night, and I leave tomorrow for Iceland, Germany, and then Switzerland for the Global Perspectives Program. I keep repeating this to myself because it hasn’t really sunk in yet.

This past week, I have been running on caffeine and lists. Each day there was a new list with all of the things that I needed to get done for classes, work, summer research, and preparing for the trip. Everything that I had to do was on those lists.

And now, I have checked off (almost) everything from my to-do list. And I can actually start to think about the trip. I have no idea what adventures lay ahead, but I am so excited for adventure. I am excited to stop in Iceland and go on a Puffin Cruise. I am excited to navigate unknown roads as Gary drives us around the country. I am excited to visit relatives in Garmisch, and I am excited to meet new friends in Zurich.

But I am most excited to talk to people, to hear their stories, and learn about other people and other places. As part of the Global Perspectives Program, we get to travel to several universities and meet with faculty, students, and staff. I am so excited to just learn about another corner of the world.

I was talking to my mom about grad school and all the work I had left to do today. And she said: “Sometimes it’s a cordon bleu kind of day, and sometimes it’s a mac and cheese kind of day.” In other words, sometimes you can accomplish amazing things, and sometimes you just have to do small things. Today is a mac and cheese kind of day. But who knows, maybe tomorrow there will be cordon bleu.

I switched fields two years ago for a number of reasons. I have always been drawn towards teaching and mentoring. I think everyone should have access to good education. I don’t think education should be limited to those who can afford to pay for it, and I really don’t like the phrase: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

So I found myself switching from engineering to engineering education. And I love it. I learned about several learning theories, reflected on my own educational experience, and tried out new ideas in my classroom. I don’t need to change the world. I am happy if I can make things better for a few people, if I can inspire a few people.

What I would love to do is help change the culture of engineering education and the culture of higher education more broadly.

But I am just one person from a small town in Colorado. As I read Parker Palmer’s  A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited, I found myself thinking “well what could that one person have done?” Palmer described a case study from the medical field where a patient dies unexpectedly after an uneventful liver transplant. An overworked resident with very little experience as a resident was on staff at the time. My thought process as I read this case study was: What could the resident do? They were being forced to work long hours (that is what residents have to do, after all). And so on.

But then Palmer when on to say the resident in this case study could help change the institution instead of merely operating within the institution. At this point, my mind started to go off in a million different directions. Palmer then says:

The hidden curriculum of our culture portrays institutions as powers other than us, over which we have marginal control at best—powers that will harm us if we cross them. But while we may find ourselves marginalized or dismissed for calling institutions to account, they are neither other than us nor alien to us: institutions are us.

Institutions are us. Institutions are social constructions (I even talked about this in my constructivism class but it hadn’t really sunk in yet I guess). Institutions can change. But they first need to be questioned.

A lot of engineering and engineering education is about questioning and changing things and making things better. As I mentioned earlier, I am perfectly content making small changes and small improvements. But what if small improvements could lead to big changes? What if I (and other educators) could help change the culture of engineering?

Who’s with me! Cordon bleu anyone?