Cognitive Demand and Student Achievement in Concrete Technology Study
Publication: Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 143, Issue 2
Abstract
Engineering graduates require high-level cognitive abilities such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation to fulfill their obligations to society. But universities have not always been successful in developing such abilities. This paper questions whether engineering students in a civil engineering degree program at a university in South Africa are being adequately prepared to engage in higher-order cognitive activities such as reasoning, predicting, analyzing, and problem solving. The paper deploys the structure of the observed learning outcome (SOLO) taxonomy to classify assessment questions according to cognitive demand and compares first- and second-year students’ abilities to deal with questions of varying cognitive complexity. The results show that the second-year cohort performed substantively better on questions requiring mathematical calculation but not in other question types. In fact, they performed slightly worse on high-cognitive-demand questions and substantially worse on questions requiring visual identification of problems. This may imply that the additional year of higher education serves to equip students with improved mathematical abilities but does little to enhance their ability to engage in high-cognitive-demand activities.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are indebted to the concrete technology module tutors who assisted in capturing the data upon which this paper is based: Elzane Zevenster, Viola Kayingo, and Tsholo Letlape. The authors also wish to acknowledge Dr. Johnson Carroll, who read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper. Feedback received from the anonymous reviewers and chief editor for the Journal further contributed to the development and improvement of this paper.
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Published In
Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice
Volume 143 • Issue 2 • April 2017
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 9, 2015
Accepted: Jul 13, 2016
Published online: Sep 28, 2016
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2017
Published in print: Apr 1, 2017
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