Self-Directed Learning Readiness among Engineering Students during Emergency Online Instruction

Work-In-Progress: In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher education institutions in the United States rapidly transitioned to emergency online learning. At The Citadel, a residential military college with additional veteran/active duty and college transfer populations, undergraduate engineering courses before the pandemic were administered solely through face-to-face instruction. As such, changing modalities during the pandemic were a very new experience for our students. We hypothesized that students might develop improved self-directed learning readiness due to the need to manage learning in new and changing course modalities. In this study, we present changes in self-directed learning readiness among our undergraduate engineering students, as measured by the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale, at the beginning and end of emergency online instruction during the Spring 2020 semester. Generally, SDLRS scores increased during six weeks of emergency online instruction. However, juniors were the only academic class who did not experience gains in self-directed learning readiness. Interestingly, we earlier found that juniors experienced an increase in more cognitive load dimensions than other academic classes during the Spring 2020 semester. We are currently analyzing qualitative data and SDLRS scores collected in subsequent semesters to better understand the relationship between development of self-directed learning readiness and cognitive load.