"We know that students' learning outcomes are higher when they work with experiments. It's the person doing the work who learns something," explains Associate Professor of Engineering Didactics Pernille Rattleff from DTU Learning Lab before elaborating:
"And you do this because you work actively with the material, testing theses and assumptions, failing and trying again. It increases students' understanding of complex topics, and even if they don't hit the right solution right away, they have understood the underlying concepts and contexts of a problem - they don't just learn to apply formulas or follow recipes. They also gain a deeper, conceptual understanding that they can apply in new, complex contexts."
Conceptual understanding as a research area
Conceptual understanding is precisely what Kasper Zøllner, a PhD student employed at DTU Learning Lab and DTU Energy, is working on in his PhD project. He is investigating how best to support student learning and is using the teaching in the Physics course as a field of study.
"Being active and setting up an experiment yourself in the lab that, for example, puts Newton's laws of motion into play, supports your conceptual learning because you are 'forced' to understand the concepts before you can set up an experiment that gives you a solution," he says before adding:
"In this course, no 'cookbook' guides you step by step to the right result. It's a way to learn the critical and independent thinking that will eventually make you a good engineer."
"That's also why you don't hand in reports on the course," Carsten Knudsen adds. "Here, you hand in short, preferably handwritten journals that briefly describe the problem and the methodological considerations. And that's because that's the way engineers work in industry. We use our knowledge and competencies to solve a task in the best possible way. That's the approach we strive to teach all the talented students who come through our course every year."
A good mix of active and passive learning
That's not to say that traditional auditorium teaching is doomed. Plenty of knowledge and theory can't be learnt in any other way than by sticking your nose in a book and then sitting down in an auditorium, having the text interpreted by competent teachers and asking probing questions.
"But we want the mix of active and passive learning. Here we are working to educate the engineers of the future, who have both a grasp of theory and methodology, while at the same time being able to develop concrete and practical technology and solutions that benefit our society," says Pernille Rattleff.
