What I Wish I Knew About Learning as an Undergrad
One of my happiest memories is walking across the stage and receiving my diploma from Brigham Young University (BYU). All the long nights, tears from failed exams, and screaming at Matlab were finally worth it! The camaraderie between my classmates and I was strong as we persevered through our mechanical engineering degrees. As I celebrated with my family eating burritos later that day, I had no idea how drastically my views on education would change within a few months.
I had accepted a position as a PhD student in engineering education at Virginia Tech, but I didn’t fully know what that meant. I didn’t even know the program existed seven months before I graduated with my bachelor’s. My original plan was to do a PhD in mechanical engineering and focus on the social impact of design. I enjoyed working with many of the founders and editors of the BYU Design Review on products built to improve people’s lives. But something about the engineering education field intrigued me and it felt right so I drove my car 1900 miles to start a new journey.
Engineering education is a field that merges social science and technical engineering. To put it simply, we study engineers. Scholars in the field interview engineers to understand work conditions, identity, assessment, policy, and pedagogy as they relate to engineering. Because of that, my hours of Solidworks and math derivations were replaced by hours of reading papers about learning theories and issues. I quickly learned that I have been learning incorrectly and I wanted to share some key takeaways from my first two years in this program:
1) Assessment Can have Various Purposes
Assessments do not simply exist to give us a grade. Assessment FOR Learning is when we receive feedback on how we’re doing learning the material. Examples include low-stakes in-class participation or weekly quizzes that help us recognize where we are falling short. Assessment OF Learning is the traditional exam that gives you a grade and you don’t get to do corrections, it simply states to the professor what you learned [1]. While these can overlap, I treated almost every exam as an assessment OF my learning, instead of FOR my learning. I stressed about what the grade said about me as an engineer, and while I would try to learn from my midterm mistakes to prepare for the final, I never applied that knowledge going forward past the semester. My mind was solely fixed on the grade. For example, if you take your first dynamics test and get a 70%, start with the problems you got right and talk with the professor, a teaching assistant, or a friend and explain the conceptual knowledge behind the problem. Make sure that your basic understanding is correct. Can you fully describe F= ma without a calculator? If your fundamental understanding is correct, then move on to the problems you got wrong. Was the error conceptual or algebraic? Redo the problem and describe out loud the steps you are taking to solve the problem and the reasons why those methods work. Make a game plan for what errors you tend to make and how you can avoid them in the future. The hardest part is doing this even after the semester ended. Look over each class and write down what your common mistakes were and what concepts are still difficult to understand. As much as you want to embrace the relief of the class ending, don’t let the learning stop. Regardless of how your professor organizes the class, you can use every assessment opportunity as a chance for life-long learning.
2) Knowledge is Lost Exponentially when you Don’t Review it
The Forgetting Curve, attributed to Ebbinghaus in 1880, shows that within 24 hours you lose 50% of what you learned. The first few days after taking in new material are the biggest drop. While it’s really difficult to find the time, just reviewing your notes a little bit at the end of the day, or days between lectures can do wonders to help you remember key concepts. Make a schedule to review for an hour or two a week in your calendar and treat it like it’s a class or work. If you don’t prioritize the time, the review won’t happen.
The Forgetting Curve, adapted from Ebbinghaus [2]
3) Don’t Overload your Brain
The field of psychology includes the concept of Cognitive Load Theory [3]. There are thousands of papers out there that discuss it, but the main premise is that your brain can only take so much at one time. Our brains organize concepts into buckets, kind of like an intense file folder system. There’s a system for what gets marked as important and what gets thrown in the trash. To remember things, make sure that your mental file folder is organized. Keep track of what you know and show your brain that you want to remember it. You don’t need to memorize everything but focus on the main concepts. Play around with pipes, circuits, engines, etc., so other parts of your brain are engaged and it makes connections. Finally, have a system so you can open up the cabinet down the road when you need to know what to refresh. For example, I use Microsoft Onenote with folders for each area of my life (work, school, personal), and sub folders and pages for each class. I organize it by date but you can also organize by topic. This platform is easily searchable and I can use it on both my laptop and tablet. Currently, I have a spreadsheet listing every scholarly paper I read for my dissertation with a quick summary and keywords to find again later. I have a general understanding of the concepts I learn but more importantly, I know where to find the information again so my brain doesn’t need to keep everything at once in short-term memory, causing overload.
4) There Isn’t One Right Answer to Engineering
This one was actually an extension of a saying of my high school precalculus teacher, “Math isn’t about memorizing equations” - but I still struggled to internalize it during my undergraduate program. I spent so many hours going back and forth with a calculator and a teaching assistant so I could get the right heat exchange rate to the third decimal, to follow the textbook exactly. Then I learned that if your job already had the right number they wouldn’t hire you to find it. You have to establish assumptions and make an educated decision. That’s what the whole engineering design process is about! Analyze the problem, develop a solution, analyze again, and reiterate. While that’s difficult in a class that gives you a grade for that specific number you write down, realize that really great engineers don’t have one specific solution. In practice, before you check your answer for homework, review the problem again. Did you list your assumptions correctly? Does the answer make sense? Would you feel comfortable justifying your process and answer to your professor? I rushed this too much in college because I wanted to finish my homework quickly, and I missed valuable opportunities to learn how to spot my own mistakes and at the same time, how to be confident in my decisions. Learn how to use the design process in school, and then have fun creating your own textbook answers on the job!
As a final note, these recommendations all require a lot of motivation and persistence to be put into practice. Schedule times to review and reflect on your progress as you learn to learn differently, and be patient with yourself! And if you’re thinking about graduate school, check out these other awesome BYU Design Review articles:
6 Tips for Being Successful in Graduate School
References
[1] R. Lam, “Assessment as learning: examining a cycle of teaching, learning, and assessment of writing in the portfolio-based classroom,” Stud. High. Educ., vol. 41, no. 11, pp. 1900–1917, Nov. 2016, doi: 10.1080/03075079.2014.999317.
[2] J. Denny, “What Is The Forgetting Curve (And How Do You Combat It)?,” eLearning Industry. Accessed: May 04, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://elearningindustry.com/forgetting-curve-combat
[3] J. Sweller, “Cognitive load theory,” in Psychology of learning and motivation, vol. 55, Elsevier, 2011, pp. 37–76. Accessed: Apr. 30, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123876911000028
