Renjeng Su of Portland State University

Electromagnetics has proven to be a difficult course for both instructors and students. There are continued research efforts aimed to improve learning outcomes. Typically, educational research is conducted by adopting new teaching methods or materials and measuring the results by recording the overall learners’ test scores. In this talk, I will discuss a different angle for pedagogy research focused on the internal process of the students. When a student is engaged in learning a concept, a series of mental images are developed internally. Taking this concept into consideration, the basic research questions are: 1) What are the specific mental images for each student? 2) How can the images be observed? Answers to these questions will shape teaching methods and materials. A course on electromagnetic fields, with a body of intricate and challenging concepts, makes an especially suitable topic in which to investigate the answers to these questions.   

Biography:

I completed my undergraduate education in Taiwan and graduate degrees at Washington University in St. Louis. After two years at the NASA Ames Research Center, I accepted a faculty position at Texas Tech. Later, I became a faculty member and an administrator in ECE at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I also served as the Dean of Engineering at CU Denver. In 2009, I joined Portland State University as Dean of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. I am now a member of the ECE faculty.

Address:1900 SW 4th Ave, ECE department, Suite 160, Portland, Oregon, United States, 97201