Excellence through Experiential Learning
Dr Brainerd Prince
The Indian education system is plagued with an obsession for grades, more so amongst the STEM and engineering fraternity. According to Aspiring Minds, a skills assessment company, 97% of engineering students feel the pressure to score high grades. An IIT Bombay internal research on its students revealed that 75% of students feel that the emphasis is more on securing good grades rather than on learning. A study conducted by NIMHANS revealed that 40% of engineering students suffer from mental health issues and one of the primecauses cited wasthe nagging pressure to score good grades.
What and why is this obsession with grades then? If grades reveal the level of one’s success and the merit gained, then in a meritocracy or in a society which is governed by merits, grades become the single most important factor on which admissions and placements, in which case, perhaps even life itself becomes dependent on grades, thereby driving an obsession that serves no purpose and merits at the end of the day. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuinggood grades, but if that is the singular focus of students at the expense of learning itself, then this frenzied ambition to secure good grades can become toxic and take an unexpected toll. The problem becomes increasingly acute in a society which has limited opportunities and an extra high population. When grades become central then it also attracts other evils such as rote learning, cheating, and plagiarism.
It would be heartening to see the emphasis shift from an obsession with grades to an emphasis on excellence and from a pedagogy based on rote learning to one that inspireswisdom in students. While this is applicable to all streams of education, I believe this has higher relevance to the engineering fraternity as they are the builders of our world. Even the highest of grades accompanied by lacklustre skills and imagination will in no way aid in building anything of elegance and beauty. Rote learning of facts with no ability to wisely apply knowledge in the real world is a sure recipe for unemploymentin an ever-changing, ever-evolving universe where change and adaptability are ways of life.
So, how do we then promote wisdom and excellence amongst engineering students? While there could be several ways to achieve this purpose, I would like to propose experiential learning as a central pedagogy for engineering students as a way forward.
Schön has argued that ‘Experiential learning involves a process of reflection-in-action, where learners engage in ongoing reflection and problem-solving as they engage with the world’ and Dewey has similarly claimed that ‘Experiential learning involves the integration of active and reflective modes of learning.’ We can learn a lot of insights from both Dewey and Schön. I argue that there are three key components of experiential learning which equally are also the means of producing excellence.
The first component is ‘meaningful experiences’ which need to become an important part of the curriculum and pedagogy. This requires the teacher to design meaningful experiences as part of the lesson plan rather than recycling long lists of facts for memorization. The project-based-learning or PBO also seeks to offer the same approach.
Secondly a focus on ‘reflective thinking’ as a central part of the learning experience. While meaningful experiences providestudents with an opportunity to engage in real-world problem-solving activities, it requires them to reflectively think about what they are doing rather than blindly learn by rote.
Finally, redesigning evaluation criteria. The evaluation now is no longer based merely on reproducing facts, but rather on several other parameters that inform the assessment rubric. The ability to reflectively think andproduce meaningful action in the world and the capacity to connect actions and experiences to broader concepts and ideas become the central criteria for evaluation.
Evaluation based on these criteria requires the student to not just memorize knowledge, but it necessitates them to reflectively solve problems in a real-world setting while connecting their experiences with the concepts learnt.
If the purpose of engineering education is all about equipping students with knowledge and skills to solve problems in the world and build the world through technological innovation, then the pedagogy of ‘experiential learning’ deeply resonates with such a larger purpose. And that is exactly where the need to reimagine technology education comes in.
I believe that by incorporating the experiential learning approach, the landscape of engineering education will drastically change, and the quest will now be for how to optimally engage in meaningful experiences of problem-solving rather than reproducing facts and formulae. Perhaps, this will build wisdom in our engineers – the ability to meaningfully act in the world, and also drive them on a path of excellence as their learning outputs are out there for all to see. The IEEE-published research (2018) on the impact of experiential learning amongst undergraduate engineering students has clearly shown that students that took the experiential learning approach outperformed those who didn’t, not only in terms of grades and placements but also in the areas of creative thinking, problem-solving, leadership, teamwork, communication skills and in being industry-ready.
Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.
