Transportation Engineering Instructional Practices

Abstract

Instructional practices in transportation engineering education are evolving, and only some of these changes have been documented in the literature. This paper provides a systematic review of journal articles and refereed conference papers that address innovations in transportation engineering education; the focus is on novel instructional practices and their influence on student learning. The literature review finds 46 articles for analysis, with an increasing frequency of those publications over time. Instructional practices described in these papers include simulation, visualization, problem-based learning, and other active-learning techniques. Most of these articles were written by individual researchers or a team of researchers at a single institution, and few of the articles cite one another; this finding suggests a need for more effective dissemination. Techniques for measuring student learning include in-person interviews, a variety of survey types (typically multiple choice or open-ended), concept maps, and direct assessment of student work. These techniques are implemented mostly as postassessments, but in some work, a pre- and postcourse experimental design is employed. It is clear that more rigorous evaluation of student learning, resulting from changes in teaching practices, should be considered. This analytical review of the literature provides a resource for transportation engineering educators to identify pedagogical practices that are relevant to their courses and suggestions for how to measure the effect of these techniques on student learning.