The document discusses engaging students as partners in engineering education design to better understand and foster intellectual abilities. It conducted focus groups and student-led learning projects to understand the student experience. Key findings include: students value context and tools over just knowledge; authentic experiences are important; and collaborating with students provides valuable new perspectives that can fundamentally redesign engineering curricula.

1. Students as Partners in the Design and
Practice of Engineering Education:
Understanding and Enabling Development of
Intellectual Abilities
Gary C. Wood & Beverley Gibbs
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Sheffield
g.c.wood@sheffield.ac.uk | @GC_Wood

2. Intellectual ability in engineering
● Intellectual ability: deploying knowledge in analysis, creating solutions and
value, and exercising judgement
● Essence of engineering – responds to employer demands for real-world
application (RAEng 2007) and calls for integrative, applied learning
environments (RAEng 2010)
● BUT we cannot teach IA directly: we need to provide an environment
conducive to its development
● To foster the development of IA, we need first to understand what it’s like to
learn in our programmes – so we need student collaboration.

3. Research questions
To move towards true student engagement, we seek to understand:
1. How we can work with students in a way that moves beyond ideas of
‘feedback’?
2. How do students make sense of the curriculum they are following?
We were unable to find tools to identify, explore and collaboratively take action in
a holistic way.

4. Our Approach
● Focus groups – ‘Tell me about fourth year/returning from a year in industry’
– aims to understand the problems students face
● Learning through action:
○ iForge student led-makerspace – observe student passions and interests,
and how they structure their own learning
○ Student learning design:
■ Creating learning resources for younger students – students designing
learning of difficult concepts for other students
■ Developing whole modules to show us what they need
■ Allow students to engage on their own terms.

5. Findings 1: Collaboration approaches
1. Don’t focus on existing experience for discussion: get students to
create/design ideal learning experiences, e.g. ‘what should we do with this
20 credit space’?
● Avoids focus on hygiene factors that offers no higher understanding
● Show vs. tell – allows students to freely express outcomes they want to
achieve
● Promotes integration across multiple learning outcome areas – capabilities
rather than disembodied knowledge
● Makes students’ thought process visible – points out the questions we
should ask to delve deeper, and areas to explore.

6. Findings 1: Collaboration approaches
2. Students’ learning experience designs can have value for actual
implementation in themselves, but this isn’t the aim:
● The aim is to facilitate discussion (but some of what students produce
may be workable and useful!)
● Using the design/create/show approach makes naïvety and lack of
specialist educational knowledge a valuable attribute in students.

7. Findings 1: Collaboration approaches
3. “You cannot discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the
shore for a long time” (André Gide)
● Staff-student interaction disorientating for staff
● Requires particular capabilities, e.g.: genuine interest in student
perspective; ability not to jump to conclusions or solutions; capacity to
understand and pursue the spirit of students’ aspirations in shaping
more structured implementations.

8. Findings 2: New perspectives on the student
experience
1. Content vs. context: we focus on content and a coherent learning journey;
students are also attuned to context and want access to expertise to pursue
their interests
2. Students want tools (=intellectual abilities), not just knowledge, so that they
can solve problems and transition into different contexts.
3. Authenticity is important, particularly for students who have undertaken
industry placements, who distinguish ‘real-world’ and ‘jumping through
hoops’.

9. Is it really worth it?
● Student collaboration is difficult and takes a lot of effort
● Immeasurable value: we wouldn’t have focused on Intellectual Abilities or
their value in the student learning experience if students hadn’t shown us
that this was a useful area to explore
● Think of your students as having an expertise and experience that you don’t
have, and which needs to be brought into the curriculum design process
● Exploring and integrating student and staff expertise has proved to be
immensely powerful: we are fundamentally redesigning our curriculum
based on these findings.

10. Students as Partners in the Design and
Practice of Engineering Education:
Understanding and Enabling Development of
Intellectual Abilities
Gary C. Wood & Beverley Gibbs
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Sheffield
g.c.wood@sheffield.ac.uk | @GC_Wood