01551542

Component

There is an increasing need to measure and evaluate the quality of each mode, using indicators such as volume, capacity, density, and level of service established in the Highway Capacity Manual. Although the traditional transportation engineering education still inherits a didactic “chalk and talk” tradition of teacher-centered direct instruction based on textbooks, lectures, reading and individual written assignments formats, a growing consensus in the literature on how to improve the quality of learning suggests that adaptions to problem-based learning methods could firstly improve learning experiences, problem solving, skill acquisition and reasonable level of skill transfer from a student perspective, and secondly develop better professional competence and preparation in these needed highway capacity analysis skills. However, problem-based learning is an innovative and challenging pedagogical method to engineering education -- innovative due to the lack of literature regarding learner-centered teaching approaches in transportation engineering education, especially for teaching highway capacity concept to undergraduate students; and challenging because engineering education consists of concepts that are usually hierarchically organized, any missing essential concepts might increase the stress-levels of students, diminish motivation and indeed result in a failure to learn. This paper describes the educational basis of problem-oriented and project-based learning (POPBL) approaches that have been developed as an integral part of a 4-year undergraduate engineering degree program in the University of Delaware and incorporated into the transportation curriculum, using real world cases to teach students how to think like expert practitioners. The use of the POPBL as an effective and efficient approach for teaching highway capacity concepts in the University of Delaware's transportation curriculum is firmly based on the existing literature theory of learning experiences. A seven-phase POPBL conceptual framework and the experiences of employing POPBL are presented to demonstrate how it operates in transportation engineering education.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB40 Highway Capacity and Quality of Service. Alternate title: Problem-Oriented and Project-Based Learning (POPBL) as An Innovative Approach for Teaching Highway Capacity Concepts

01550057

15-4544

English

17p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Curricula; Education and training methods; Highway capacity; Learning; Transportation engineering

Highway Capacity Manual; University of Delaware

Problem based learning; Project based education

Education and Training; Highways; I70: Traffic and Transport

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-4544

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:30PM