Knowledge Structures

The Concept Warehouse

Current People: Harpreet Auby, Sarah Kaczynski, Kate Nutnicha Nigon, Tom Ekstedt

Seeking to broadly support concept-based active learning in engineering, our group has led development and growth of the Concept Warehouse. Concept-based active learning is the use of activity-based pedagogies whose primary objectives are to help students to value deep conceptual understanding (instead of only factual knowledge) and then to facilitate their development of that understanding. The Concept Warehouse has been developed to provide instructors and their students with a cyber-enabled infrastructure with high-quality content to support this type of concept-based active learning, first in Chemical Engineering (see our YouTube video for a one-minute video overview), and more recently in Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics, and Physics. The Concept Warehouse provides three distinct but complementary functions: (a) a content repository, (b) an audience response system to deliver content, and (c) learning analytics that provide data to instructors and researchers. Importantly, the project provides faculty access to a community to support this work.

Our group’s research in this thread has focused on two themes: (i) instructional practices using the Concept Warehouse and (ii) its propagation throughout the community. Work on instructional practices includes use of the tool as students actively engage during class by answering multiple choice concept questions individually and in groups. The tool allows the instructor to prompt students to provide written responses to justify the selection of the multiple-choice answer that they have chosen. We have found that prompting students to explain and elaborate on their answer choices leads to greater focus and use of normative scientific reasoning processes.

Although there is overwhelming evidence for the efficacy of concept-based active learning, how to get more faculty to include these activities in their teaching remains a problem. This has been the focus of our propagation research since the Concept Warehouse was made publicly available to the Chemical Engineering community in 2012. This research includes how the Concept Warehouse was designed for propagation, how communication channels influence awareness and adoption, factors influencing the innovation-decision process for adopters and potential adopters, and how the network of users has grown over time. Through examination of the early stages of the innovation’s life, we learned that the most effective channels are either pedagogy-centered professional development workshops in which the tool is embedded or direct partnerships with individual adopters. In a current research project, we are characterizing aspects of the educational system within five diverse institutional contexts, and relating that to the ways that the tool is used by instructors.