A metacognition approach to engineering management education: the Debatethon

1 Introduction The complexity and multifaceted nature of current technological and social changes requires new skills and values to properly tackle the posed challenges. Educators and teachers are therefore called to implement novel practices and approaches to stimulate learners and contribute to the development of a critical mindset. This is particularly true in the context of engineering, where traditional face-to-face lectures, typically used for the fundamentals and technical concepts, may fail in preparing students for the intricate real-world dynamics [1]. Debate can be one of the methodologies highly effective to this end [2]. It has been recognized in literature as a valuable approach to foster critical thinking and communication skills [3; 4], it encourages students to analyze an issue in multiple perspectives [2] and promote students’ participation and discussions [5]. The debate is a pedagogical approach consisting of a verbal challenge in which two parts confront each other on opposing positions: debaters argue on a specific topic in a limited time and following specific rules to present their theses [6]. This approach relies on the theory of constructive pedagogy, leveraging on the concept of cooperative learning and peer education and it is included among the interactive teaching methods [7]. The dialogic classrooms engage students in learning activities into the higher levels of the Bloom’s Taxonomy, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation [8]. In addition, dialogue and discussion are a fundamental part of human beings, consequently, fostering learning and understanding in such a social process as debate can contribute to the development of social abilities of the learners [9]. Debates can be implemented in various disciplines, such as accounting [3], marketing [4], both for adult learning [2] and for adolescents [10]. The application of such an approach in the STEM field is rarer, even though some peculiar cases are reported in literature, e.g., the authors in [11] propose the debate for discussing ethical issues in the degree of Biomedical Engineering, [12] presents the use of debate in English Foreign Language course, and [13] illustrates the model of mathematical debate. In the current work, we propose the debatethon: a marathon of debates in which participants discuss dichotomies of a given topic. We realized the pilot of the debatethon, involving the students of the bachelor’s and master’s degree courses in Management Engineering of the University of Pisa. The debate was organized in a one-daysession of 5 hours, and it was held in the Museum of Calculus (Museo degli Strumenti del Calcolo) of the University of Pisa. The objective of such a location was to motivate students and encourage them in an open-minded interaction both with peers and facilitators. The implementation of educational activities out of the classroom can enhance interdisciplinary learning and teaching experiences [15; 16]. The preposition focuses on the conceptual dichotomies of the figure of the management engineer, that are: (a) methods: engineering versus management; (b) skills: soft versus hard; (c) approach: process-based versus goal-based; (d) performance: effectiveness versus efficiency; (e) working environment: physical versus digital. The expected learning outcomes of the proposed activity are to develop analytical, critical, argumentative and communication skills. The evaluation is based on the changes in the audience’s sentiment, measured before and after the debate. 2 Pilot experience of the Debatethon The debate requires a well-defined format, with specification on roles for people involved, rules for conducting the session and duration. In our pilot debatethon, the following roles are set up: Facilitators, which are professors of the Department of Management Engineering, researchers and PhD students from the Departments of Management Engineering and Computer Science. The presence of different figures can enable a distributed moderation, considered as a vantage point for success in discussions [14]; Tutors, i.e., Master’s degree students in Management Engineering, who performed this activity as part of the capstone project “SMART INNOVATION 2022”; Debaters, who are bachelor’s degree students in Management Engineering. Then we defined the preposition of the debate, namely a concept characterized by several dichotomies, and so we described this concept in terms of the identified opposite features. Before the event, we submitted a questionnaire on the dichotomy to ex-ante position the students. The initial preferences of the students on the opposite positions are used to select the opposite features which polarize at most the audience and to group the students based on their homogeneous answers. Six groups of five students were formed, and each "pair of groups" was assigned to the 3 most polarized dualities (a, b, d). The day of the event, each group worked on its own argument with the support of its tutor and the stimuli of the facilitators. After the oral presentation of both positions of the dichotomy, all participating students voted on the argument deemed most convincing. The groups that managed to be more persuasive with the arguments, bringing the audience to its side, was able to win the challenge. We collected the final preferences of the students on the opposite positions. The presentation confirmed the sentiment for the dichotomies (a) and (d), while they completely turned the game for the feature (b). The presented pilot of debatethon is a powerful approach for cooperative learning and peer education. Its strengths are the presence of different facilitators and students from different degrees, the implementation out of the classroom, and the development of the transversal skills. Finally, the debatethon is a game: getting involved in the dynamics of the team and the competition is the best way to learn.