Teaching to fellow students is the best way for students to learn subject matter for the most difficult sophomore electrical engineering classes, according to associate professor David Shattuck, who facilitates learning in a state-funded program that is helping students succeed where others have often failed.
"Here's the premise: I learn things best not when I do them but when I teach them to somebody else," says Shattuck, who helped bring a collaborative learning program to the UH Cullen College of Engineering with the intention of boosting enrollment and graduation rates for electrical and computer engineering (ECE) students.
"Now that's a paradox, that's a bizarre notion," says Shattuck, who worked with ECE department chairman Fritz Claydon to help bring in about $360,000 in state and private funding for the plan. "How do I teach it to somebody else unless I've learned it already? But in fact you learn it better when you try to teach it to somebody else."
In group study, people tend to concentrate on the learner's benefits, but it's the teacher's benefits that are the real win, says Shattuck.
"Most people go into a group learning situation thinking, 'I want really smart people in my group.' That works really badly for you because then you don't ever get to do any of the teaching. If you really think about it hard, it makes sense. To be able to formulate it clearly enough to be able to explain it to somebody else, you've got to formulate it clearly in your own mind."
The primary part of the learning initiative is called Redshirt Camp, a term chosen because of the program's similarity to "redshirting" college athletes to allow them to practice with the team for a year without losing a year of eligibility. The camp is specifically designed to prepare eligible students for the challenging sophomore ECE curriculum, particularly Circuit Analysis and Electromagnetics.
Last year, students who participated in the camp and related workshops had a significantly higher pass rate for the two most difficult sophomore level courses. Pass rates for both courses historically hover around 50 to 60 percent, but program participants passed at a rate of 73 and 91 percent, respectively, Shattuck says.
"They're tough courses," Shattuck says. "They're crucial courses. Many aspects of electrical engineering are based on these two courses. If we can get students to learn this material better, not just lower the standard and pass them, but actually have them learn the material better, they will succeed in engineering better. We're also being asked to increase the number of good graduates because industry wants more good graduates."
The program features a highly interactive and collaborative learning experience led by ECE faculty, with an emphasis on collaborative learning between students, who basically teach each other while instructors facilitate the process.
"Gerry Paskusz in his PROMES (Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies) program has been doing this for decades," Shattuck says, "and we unabashedly stole from them the ideas for this program. But we didn't just steal their ideas, we hired consultants to tell us how to do it well."
The camp and workshops are funded by the Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium (TETC), a statewide program created to compensate for a dramatic drop in engineer graduates over the past decade, a time when technology jobs represented the largest sector of private industry employment in Texas. In 1990 there were 1,098 electrical engineering graduates from all of the Texas universities. By the end of the decade, the number of electrical engineering graduates had fallen 14 percent to 944.
Composed of representatives of the public and private sectors, TETC's mission is to increase graduation rates at Texas' engineering and computer science programs.
How are the TETC programs faring since their inception two years ago? The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board estimates that the first round of grants will increase the statewide number of electrical engineering graduates by 13 percent.
UH students have responded very positively to the program, including junior Martin Martinez, a graduate of Ross S. Sterling High School in Baytown, who says the camp and workshops provided a valuable resource because of the unique learning methods employed.
"The camp was an environment geared toward helping us learn, but we were never actually handed the answers," he says. "We were always made to reason and figure things out on our own. They indirectly helped us but never actually told us what to do next. The most difficult part is setting up the problem. In our exams, that was where most of the credit was, probably 80 percent of the grade."
Fellow student Juan Rodriguez, also a junior, says the lessons learned in the camp and workshops have continued to pay dividends as he moves forward with other courses.
"What I discovered is as you get into the higher-level courses it's more important to know how to approach solving problems," Rodriguez says. "The program gives you a very good grasp of the fundamentals. I liked the experience of working in groups. I liked the collaboration process. And I liked the problem solving and creative thinking challenges involved. I definitely would recommend the program to other students."
Whether state funding for the program will continue will be decided during the current legislative session in Austin.