Richard M. Felder

North Carolina State University | NCSU · Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

An incredible set of free bimonthly engineering education webinars begins next week that might be of interest to you. Named the "Brent-Felder Webinar Series on Effective Teaching" by its organizers (the name wasn't our idea), it features some of the top engineering educators in the world (see picture below) and covers topics of great current intere...

Higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines has been in a turbulent period for several decades. Pressures for reform include declining STEM student enrollments, high attrition rates from STEM curricula, and the rise of powerful alternative teaching strategies shown by cognitive science and educational re...

This paper examines methods of actively engaging students in online university-level STEM courses. It describes a variety of synchronous and asynchronous engagement strategies, cites research supporting their effectiveness, and offers suggestions for maximizing the effectiveness of active engagement regardless of which strategies are adopted to ach...

p>La forma en que un individuo percibe y procesa la información se llama, en conjunto, el estilo de aprendizaje del individuo. Los estilos de aprendizaje se han discutido exhaustivamente en la bibliografía de la psicología educacional, y, desde 1960, se han desarrollado aproximadamente 30 instrumentos de evaluación del aprendizaje (Jensen, 1987).</...

span>La enseñanza centrada en el alumno es un extenso enfoque que incluye sustituir las clases dadas de la manera tradicional por el aprendizaje activo. Esto permite que los estudiantes sean responsables de su propio aprendizaje y además que el aprendizaje se dé al ritmo del estudiante y/o emplear el aprendizaje cooperativo, es decir, el basado en...

span>Los problemas más arduos que enfrenta nuestra sociedad ----cómo proveer a todos nuestros ciudadanos de comida, vivienda y cuidados médicos adecuados y asequibles, transporte público económico y eficiente, energía limpia y segura---- no se resolverán por métodos fáciles ni convencionales. Si así fuera, ya se habrían resuelto. Desde el momento e...

span>El Comité de Educación del IMIQ me encargó dijera unas palabras sobre el perfil del profesor universitario en ingeniería química. Esta petición parece trivial después de más de 100 años de estar produciendo ingenieros químicos, pero el hecho es que la calidad de los egresados en general y en particular en ingeniería química deja mucho que dese...

span>Un punto en común en los análisis sobre el futuro de la ingeniería química, que actualmente se lleva a cabo de forma insistente en revistas, y simposios, es que deben incluirse nuevas materias en el currículo de la licenciatura. Las nuevas materias que se comentan son, en un orden no específico: biotecnología, aplicaciones en computadoras, mic...

This introduction to chemical processes lays the foundation for a chemical engineering curriculum. It shows beginning students how to apply engineering techniques to the solution of process-related problems by breaking each problem down into individual component parts, defining the relationship between them, and reuniting them in a single solution....

Teaching and Learning STEM presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching courses and assessing students’ learning. The book draws on the authors’ extensive backgrounds and decades of experience in STEM education and faculty development. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to implement t...

Good and not-so-good ways to flip a classroom (i.e., introduce new course material online and then process it actively in class).

Instructors often incorporate self- and peer evaluations when they use teamwork in their classes, which is common in management education. However, the process is often time consuming and frequently does not match well with guidance provided by the literature. We describe the development of a web-based instrument that efficiently collects and analy...

Faculty at North Carolina State University, US, has realized that a powerful alternative to traditional lectures and readings is to have students go through complete or partially worked-out derivations and examples in class, explaining them step-by-step to one another. One format for this technique is an active-learning structure, called Thinking-A...

Several measures need to be taken to reduce the number of cheating cases in the campuses. One of the experts, Carpenter, listed a number of questionable actions and asked students which ones they would regard as cheating. The results include copying from another student on an in-class exam (96%), copying from a crib sheet on a closed-book test (92%...

Background Economic globalization, rapid advances in technology and cognitive science, and a worldwide movement toward outcomes-based program accreditation increasingly require changes in the traditional model of engineering education design and delivery. As yet, no validated framework exists for designing instructional development programs that wo...

Academic and research institutions are making efforts to introduce a reliable grading process that can help them in assessing soft skills of engineering students. A reliable grading system needs to assess that students have been adequately instructed in appropriate methods and skills required to meet the criteria set by it. A grading checklist can...

Learning styles are preferences and tendencies students have for certain ways of taking in and processing information and responding to different instructional environments. They are neither infallible guides to student behavior nor made-up constructs that have no basis in reality, but simply useful descriptions of common behavior patterns. Althoug...

Since its inception in 1992, the NSF-sponsored Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) has successfully induced large numbers of engineering faculty members to participate in instructional development programs and to adopt proven but (in engineering) non-traditional instructional methods. This paper briefly...

A multifaceted program at North Carolina State University involving workshops and mentorships helps prepare new faculty members and graduate students for successful academic careers. This paper describes the elements of the program, reviews assessment data for each element, and offers recommendations to engineering schools wishing to establish thei...

The National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI) is a three-day teaching workshop that has been given annually since 1991 in conjunction with the Annual ASEE Conference. In the early spring of 2008, a web-based survey sent to 607 workshop alumni asked about the effects of the NETI on their teaching practices, their students' and their own ratings o...

Institute and State University. The coalition began its second five-year funding period in 1997 with a mission of scaling up and institutionalizing the educational reforms developed and pilottested in the first five years. A major component of the Year 6–10 effort is the design and implementation of a coalition-wide faculty development (FD) program...

Engineering professors, like professors in every field, have always experimented with innovative instructional methods, but traditionally little was done to link the innovations to learning theories or to evaluate them beyond anecdotal reports of student satisfaction. More scholarly approaches have become common in the past two decades as a consequ...

About 15 years ago one of the authors (RF) began to experiment with groupwork in his engineering courses. After making every mistake in the book (which he had not yet read), he recognized that there must be more to getting students to work together effectively than simply putting them in groups and asking them to do something, but he wasn’t sure wh...

This paper describes a faculty development program designed specifically for engineering faculty and implemented on an 8-campus coalition of engineering schools. In the five years of the program’s existence, a large percentage of the faculty has participated in faculty development activities and adopted proven but (in engineering) non-traditional t...

If you are like most university professors, you were not taught anything about how to teach in graduate school or when you began in your first faculty position. All you had to go on was how your professors taught, but nobody taught them anything about teaching either. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s our system. Teaching is too complex an...

In recent years the scholarship of teaching has gained increasing recognition in engineering education as a legitimate and valuable faculty activity. Growing numbers of faculty members engaged in educational research have been using surveys as principal components of their assessment programs. These researchers quickly discover that using individua...

The correlation between research and teaching and the steps required to be followed in order to strengthen their relationship has been discussed. Undergraduate research provides several benefits such as improving retention of some student populations and influencing some students to pursue graduate study. The link between research and teaching can...

B ackground The National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI) is a three‐day teaching workshop that has been given annually since 1991 in conjunction with the Annual ASEE Conference. Its goals are to improve the participants' teaching effectiveness, promote their engagement in scholarly teaching and educational scholarship, and motivate them to enga...

An experienced faculty member and a relatively new one spent a semester in a mentoring partnership in which each taught a section of the same course. The two instructors regularly sat in on each other's classes and met for weekly debriefing sessions. In this paper they reflect on what they did, what they learned, and what lessons the experience mig...

Research performance has been the main and sometimes the only criterion for tenuring and promoting engineering faculty at research universities. There is no logical reason to expect productivity in research and effectiveness in teaching to be closely related, since research and teaching have different goals and require different skills and personal...

Richard M. Felder of North Carolina State University shares his views about Professor Emeritus Jim Stice, who celebrated hid 80th birthday in 2008. James Edward Stice received B.S. Ch.E. from the University of Arkansas in 1949 and his M.S. in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1952. He retired from the UT faculty in 1...

Some of the significant mistakes that engineering instructors need to avoid during teaching engineering students, are discussed. An engineering student who is more careful and methodical but slow in problem solving may become a good engineer instead of those who are quick but careless. Instructors need to evaluate their students by conducting test...

Various myths about student ratings of teaching abound on every campus are discussed. Research studies have shown that student ratings correlate positively with every other measure of teaching effectiveness, including alumni ratings, peer ratings, and student motivation. Individual instructors who give high grades relative to local averages may get...

Academicians have been arguing for decades about whether or not faculty research supports undergraduate instruction. Those who say it doesa group that includes most administrators and faculty memberscite many ways in which research can enrich teaching, while those on the other side cite numerous studies that have consistently failed to show a measu...

Several modern trends call into question the effectiveness of how we prepare students to be chemical engineers. Thanks to globalization of the economy and incredibly rapid advances in technology, most things American engineers used to do will be done in the future by either engineers in developing countries or computers. Our graduates will conseque...

In the past century, American chemical engineering students could pretty much map out their careers while still in college and be fairly accurate, at least for the next decade or two. They would graduate, go into the chemical or petroleum industry and be process or project or production or sales engineers, OR, go to graduate school and then take a...

Some of the significant mistakes committed by faculty members in teaching students are discussed. The first mistake committed by teachers is that they call for volunteers, when they ask questions in the classroom. This process leads to students avoiding to volunteer and interact with their teachers. Some teachers commit the mistake of discontinuing...

Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent have provided valuable suggestions to complete a writing project in a reasonable period of time. They have suggested that writers should give dedicate short and frequent periods of time regularly to their major writing projects, because the strategy of waiting for large blocks of time to work on major writing pro...

The institutions associated with chemical engineering education are investing more money for the efficient faculty of chemical engineering. It is required to provide early guidance to the new teachers on the efficient teaching procedure, do good research, and balance the demands of teaching, research, service, and personal life. This orientation pr...

Academicians have been arguing for decades about whether or not faculty research supports undergraduate instruction. Those who say it does—a group that includes most administrators and faculty members—cite many ways in which research can enrich teaching, while those on the other side cite numerous studies that have consistently failed to show a mea...

A study was conducted on the Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles © (ILS) to assess reliability, factor structure, and construct validity as well to determine whether changing its dichotomous response scale to a five-option response scale would improve relia-bility and validity. Data collected in this study had internal consis-tency reliability...

Rebecca Brent and Richard M. Felder present a scenario of a disappointed student just failed in the test in front of the participants in the Crisis Clinic segment of the teaching workshops and tell the step-by-step procedure to help the student. The first step in the algorithm is to stop the student from leaving the course and then to offer him a b...

A teamwork survey was conducted at Oakland University, Rochester, MI, in 533 engineering and computer science courses over a two-year period. Of the 6435 student respondents, 4349 (68%) reported working in teams. Relative to the students who only worked individually, the students who worked in teams were significantly more likely to agree that the...

The term cooperative learning (CL) refers to students working in teams on an assignment or project under conditions in which certain criteria are satisfied, including that the team members be held individually accountable for the complete content of the assignment or project. This chapter summarizes the defining criteria of cooperative learning, su...

Richard M. Felder of North Carolina State University have been encouraging active and cooperative learning that makes students more responsible for their own learning than they are when instructors simply lecture. Felder thinks that teaching means making learning happen and not just putting out information. The performance evaluation of the student...

Some of the significant tips are provided to overcome the challenges related to developing an approach for creating new courses in chemical engineering. Some of the significant steps that need to be followed to develop a rational approach, include start preparing the approach for teaching a new course, get feedback during the course, writing detail...

The two-part series of papers of which this is the first part describes the structure of the stoichiometry course at North Carolina State University in the fall of 2005. The course had a variety of learning objectives, including traditional objectives related to the course content and also objectives involving creative thinking skills, communicatio...

This two-part series describes the structure of the stoichiometry course at North Carolina State University. The course had a variety of learning objectives, and several nontraditional pedagogies were used in the course delivery. The first paper outlined the course structure and policies, the preparation given to the teaching assistants who played...

For several years, the stoichiometry course at N.C. State University has incorporated a variety of student-centered teaching methods, including extensive active and cooperative learning. This paper describes the instructional approach used in the course, outlines student responses to it, and offers recommendations to instructors contemplating a sim...

The views presented by Richard M. Felder, on the uncertainties that exist in education and to check the pros and cons of the education system as well as the faculty are discussed. He suggests that new faculty members who get formal training will be better teachers and more successful researchers after two years that their counterparts who get the t...

This study examines the effectiveness and implementation in the sciences of inductive teaching methods, including inquiry learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, case-based teaching, discovery learning and just-in-time teaching.

So it seems that it's no longer enough for you to teach about the Navier-Stokes equations and potential flow past submerged objects. The ABET coordinator says that students in the fluids course have to be taught oral communications too, and the department head got inspired at some workshop and now wants to teach critical thinking in every course, i...

Traditional engineering instruction is deductive, beginning with theories and progressing to the applications of those theories. Alternative teaching approaches are more inductive. Topics are introduced by presenting specific observations, case studies or problems, and theories are taught or the students are helped to discover them only after the n...

Various factors that should be considered for teaching engineering education in the 21st century are discussed. The professors should find out at the beginning of the course the knowledge level of the students and their misconceptions about the subjects, and start teaching from that point. The professors should focus on facts, formulas, and algorit...

The future graduates in the US will need additional skills to get and keep jobs in the changing American job market. American workers with certain different skills such as creative researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs who can help their companies stay ahead of the technology development curve will continue to find jobs in the new economy. The...

Effective use of portable computers in lecture classes was discussed. Several formats for computer-based activities in class should be used on a rotating basis. If all students have computers, they may work individually, or in pairs or trios, or individually first and then in pairs to compare and reconcile solutions. If there are only enough comput...

A mathematical model for the mass transfer of solutes between whole cucumbers and brine in cucumber fermentation has been developed that takes into account permeation of solutes through stomata in the cucumber skin and through the epidermal cells in the skin, as well as film diffusion through the surrounding brine boundary layer. The model was used...

The disadvantages of using powerpoint in conferences, presentations and invited seminars is discussed. One of the important disadvantages of powerpoint is that if the student did not have the copy of the slide in front of them they would frantically take note in a futile effort to keep up with the slide. Making powerpoints slides takes a huge amoun...

An outcomes-based accreditation system for engineering programs was adopted in 2001 in the United States and is used by all full and provisional signatories of the Washington Accord. The system requires major transformations in the ways engineering curricula are structured, delivered, and assessed. As might be expected, many engineering staff membe...

A multi-university research team is working to design a peer evaluation instrument for cooperative learning teams that is simple, reliable, and valid. In this work, an overview of the process of developing behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) will be presented, including the establishment of a theoretical basis for the instrument and a descri...

Students have different levels of motivation, different attitudes about teaching and learning, and different responses to specific classroom environments and instructional practices. The more thoroughly instructors understand the differences, the better chance they have of meeting the diverse learning needs of all of their students. Three categorie...

The Index of Learning Styles© (ILS) is an instrument designed to assess preferences on the four dimensions of the Felder-Silverman learning style model. The Web-based version of the ILS is taken hundreds of thousands of times per year and has been used in a number of published studies, some of which include data reflecting on the reliability and va...

A research on first-year engineering students is discussed on the factors that attracted them to engineering. A number of developments have given rise to a national movement towards a more active, cooperative, problem-based instructional model for engineering education. The research shows that students learn best when they perceive a clear need to...

The Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) was an NSF-sponsored engineering education coalition that functioned from 1992 through 2002, comprising eight engineering schools that accounted for approximately 1/13 of all U.S. engineering degrees awarded. As part of its ongoing program assessment activities, S...

As college students experience the challenges of their classes and extracurricular activities, most undergo a developmental progression in which they gradually relinquish their belief in the certainty of knowledge and the omniscience of authorities and take increasing responsibility for their own learning. At a high developmental level (which few r...

As college students experience the challenges of their classes and extracurricular activities, they undergo a developmental progression in which they gradually relinquish their belief in the certainty of knowledge and the omniscience of authorities and take increasing responsibility for their own learning. At the highest developmental level normall...

The involvement of instruction as an experiental, inquiry-based, collaborative learning and multidisciplinary subject integration is discussed. A series of lessons described by Dewey in his 1899 monograph The School and Society, are suggested to be ideal to the freshman engineering students. The active, collaborative, problem-based approach can lea...