Inductive Exercises for Water Resources Engineering

Water resources engineering is broadly the application of hydrologic principles to design and manage water infrastructure systems, including topics such as drainage design and planning and management of multi-reservoir systems. Challenges for teachers:

  • students require knowledge of hydrology, hydraulics, economics, and operations research
  • systems are constrained by their regulatory context; and there does not exist a single unified curriculum for the courses.
  • challenges such as climate change necessitate new analysis techniques.

Prof. Kasprzyk's classroom experience has suggested that an inductive learning approach can be helpful for students to discover their own creative approaches to solving water resources engineering problems and gain a sense of discovery and ownership of these new and emerging approaches. This research was presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2019 Fall Meeting.

This page explains some of the inductive learning concepts from Kasprzyk's work. Please contact him if you would like sample prompts. In the future, we hope to be able to post more materials hosted on the repository at Utah State University.

Rosenberg et al (2017) emphasized that communication is an important barrier in water resources education, recommending that in-class activities and real-world decision scenarios can help develop critical thinking skills. Climate change, increasing population, and emerging water challenges indicate the past is not a good indicator of future performance and thus new techniques will need to be created Water resources is inherently interdisciplinary, meaning it is difficult to provide a curriculum that can adequately cover all desired topics (Kasprzyk et al 2019). Inductive reasoning is using particular evidence to infer general patterns (contrasted with deduction, in which a conclusion follows from a set of given premises) (Honderich 1995) As reviewed by Newson and Delatte (2011), a deductive teaching approach has been standard in engineering education, but inductive approaches can promote a constructivist approach to education in which new knowledge can forge connections with students' existing knowledge base.