Designing cooperative learning events, peer mentoring interactions, and mentoring roles for engineering education

This dissertation explores designing engineering education aligned with the way people naturally learn. The primary assumption underlying the work is that people will learn more, and more deeply, if the learning environment capitalizes on how they naturally learn. The dissertation contains three related, but independent case studies that are being prepared for publication in engineering pedagogy. The first study identified features to design into cooperative learning events to stimulate learning. Single events that led students from concepts to application appeared to create the strongest learning environments. The second study identified key types of interactions that stimulate learning in near-peer mentoring situations. The study surfaced three mentoring interactions that stimulate learning: probing deeply to surface the mentee's preexisting understanding, helping the mentee to correct his or her preexisting understanding, and infusing new information only when the mentee is immediately prepared to use it. The third study surfaced practical near-peer mentor roles and practices which stimulate student teamwork. The mentor role of feedback facilitator was the only role identified as helping student teams develop healthy working relationships and the best role to help teams perform well.