Board 428: Work in Progress: An Open Educational Resource to Improve Architectural Engineering Students Conceptual Knowledge When Writing-to-Learn: Investigation 1

This paper presents the findings of the first of four investigations funded by the NSF to develop and then field test an open educational browser-based writing-to-learn tool called GIKS. The underlying theory is that writing-to-learn with immediate formative feedback presented as concept networks is engaging and effective for learning course lesson concepts. This work was conducted in a second-year architectural engineering course focused on building materials, processes, and modeling. Participants (n=84) completed a lesson (readings, lecture, and labs) followed by writing prompts centered on the following topics: Building with Concrete and also Wood Construction. At the end of each module, students completed the standing end-of-module multiple-choice post-test that included items from those lessons as well as items from other lessons in the module. Results to date highlight that for both lessons, the group using GIKS scored higher on the concept structure survey (more like the expert network) BUT performed lower on the multiple-choice test, the difference was significant for the Building with Concrete lesson (p < .05) but not for the Wood Construction lesson. Descriptive analysis of the group-average networks for Building with Concrete show that the group-averaged network of those using GIKS compared to the control was more like the expert network (54% vs. 36%) and especially more like peers in the other group (67%). For Wood Construction the difference between the groups was less, the group-averaged network of those using GIKS compared to the control was more like the expert (40% vs. 39%) and especially like peers in the other group (72%). These findings show that writing-to-learn with GIKS with immediate network feedback improves conceptual knowledge as expected but at the cost of detail.