Increasing Generic Engineering Competences Using Coaching and Personal Feedback

This paper presents the implementation of a new course in integrated circuit design at the Technical University of Denmark. The course deals with many of the practical aspects of doing integrated circuit design and is designed using constructive alignment. In the paper, the intended learning objective, teaching activities and the assessment are presented and it is demonstrated how coaching and personal feedback – often used in the industry – is used to improve the generic engineering competences of the students in alignment with CDIO. As the teacher has 16 years of experience from the industry the course is designed to emulate a project in a company, thereby creating an educational environment with focus on the generic engineering competences. In the project, the teacher acts as the manager and the students as employees/project members and the paper discusses how project status meetings and a review meetings operate as the major tool for teaching both technical and generic skills. In both types of meetings the teacher mainly acts as a secretary taking notes but also as a facilitator for the discussion and knowledge sharing taking place during the meetings. As the students are to construct a circuit block, much of the time spent by the students is spent on designing and analyzing circuitry using computer aided design. The paper describes how the teacher again acts as a facilitator helping the students to improve their problem solving skills. This is done by presenting the students to a problem solving methodology where the teacher constantly coaches the students to solve their problems inherently meaning that the students take ownership of their design task as well as their learning. The final element in the course, helping to improve other generic engineering competences of the students, is a methodology for providing personal feedback on their behavior. The paper describes how the 4-step model (Describe – Express – Consequence – Suggest) is used to provide feedback to the student on how behavior is perceived and also suggests a changed or continued behavior depending on the feedback being developing or positive. The paper also describes how an environment is created where the students fell safe to actively participating which is mandatory where a teacher wants to improve the generic engineering competences. The course was evaluated using the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ) and the overall score was 4.3 out of 5. The questionnaire evaluates the course in 5 categories and the results are discussed in detail in the paper. Using coaching to guide the students could lead to unclear goals but the score in the category “Clear goal and standards” of 4.2 clearly shows that this was not the case. The score in the category “Generic competences” of 4.2 also shows that the goal of the course to improve these was fulfilled. Many comments in the questionnaire stated that it was a stimulating and exiting course which is also supported by the score of 4.8 in the category “Motivation”.

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014