Aiming for a home run with electrical engineering education
Engineering education faculty member Nicole Pitterson is turning a moment of cultural confusion into classroom transformation for first-year circuits students.
When Nicole Pitterson sat confused through most of the first programming class of her master’s degree at Western Illinois University, it wasn’t because the topic was complicated — it was because of a baseball analogy.
Growing up in her native country of Jamaica, there wasn’t any professional baseball, so her professor’s attempt at making programming relatable was “off-base.”
“I saw this in other classes as well,” said Pitterson. “I went to a statistics class and the professor used a card counting example — I don’t gamble. And that was part of the rationale for my research being around the prior knowledge and experiences students have, and asking, ‘Are we using cultural examples they can connect to?’”
With her National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, Pitterson, assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, will develop models for how faculty can design and teach content for their courses in a way that aligns holistically with their students’ needs.
Igniting a spark
Over the course of the award, one of the largest CAREER grants in the College of Engineering in the last two years, Pitterson will focus on introductory engineering and circuits courses at five institutions:
- George Mason University, selected for its nontraditional student population that consists of almost 75 percent transfer students.
- University of Maryland, Baltimore County, selected for its almost 50 percent nonwhite student population, commuter school, and student-centered curriculum.
- Morgan State University, selected because it's one of the larger historically Black college and universities on the East Coast.
- Florida International University, selected for its diversity of students and its status as the largest Hispanic serving-institution in the country.
- Virginia Tech, selected because "you research your backyard," said Pitterson, and for the opportunity to study the recently completed Revolutionizing Engineering Departments grant.
“We’ll be identifying courses within the first year or two where instructors are doing amazing things, people known in their department to be really intentional about engaging students,” Pitterson said.
“So we’re studying the best cases in some sense but also trying to find the courses that have diversity in their learners — transfer, first-generation — and that plays into what institutions I chose.”
Clearing a path for change
Pitterson and her research team will
- Observe the introductory circuits courses and parse through what happens — how topics are introduced, how students connect and engage with the material, and what the instructors are doing.
- conduct pre- and post-course focus groups with students as they finish the course and transition into more advanced courses in their disciplines.
- Use the case studies to create a model for circuit courses to be used for course design clinics or course planning.
The guide will be disseminated through Virginia Tech libraries and will feature model activities, learning outcomes, and more. But Pitterson's ultimate goal is recognition for the partner universities.
“I want the cases we study to be known as where the real learning happens,” Pitterson said, “the place where students see themselves achieving whatever the outcome of the course is because they feel like everything they brought into the classroom was meaningful, was valued, and was helpful to another student even.”
