VIRTUAL: Learning. Life. Work.

Abstract

Most professional program curricula focus on the required specialized knowledge and skills to meet the profession’s needs. Yet graduates need more than subject matter competencies to meet the requirements of their professional work. Reflection, or the contemplative dimension of personal learning, has not historically received much attention within the scholarship of higher education, especially in professional programs, despite calls for more significant consideration. For example, in an article calling for curricular change in undergraduate engineering, Susan A. Ambrose (2013, p. 20) suggests that learning happens with reflection and that educators should “provide constant structured opportunities to ensure that continual reflection takes place.” Yet, most reflective practices adopted within professional programs focus on students writing journals or reflective essays and developing videos or e-portfolios. On the other hand, there has been relatively little pedagogical research into the exploration of metacognition, emphasizing the development of character virtues on final exam assessments. This presentation reports on using guided reflective questions in an engineering management course’s online final exam that explicitly assessed metacognitive awareness to help facilitate learner agency. The study uncovered dimensions of student thinking and feeling related to metacognitive activity related to the virtues of persistence, curiosity, imagination, or creativity as they navigated the course learning process. The study also discusses an integrated approach to exam development that assesses required professional knowledge, along with helping students think about and reflect on the struggles and successes that lead to their acquisition of this knowledge, such as self-awareness, persistence, and critical thinking.