Collaborative Research: Conceptual Understanding in Problem Solving and Implications for Teaching and Curriculum Developers

After receiving his doctorate in Engineering Education from Utah State University, Presentacion was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln conducting educational research in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He participated in an NSF-funded study to determine the abstraction threshold in electrical engineering curricula and identify relationships between cognitive processing exhibited by students and their course outcomes. Presentacion has experience in the telecommunication industry where he worked as a Project Manager. He has trained engineers and technicians through formal courses, on-the-job training, and supervising on field. Presentacion currently serves as a Teaching Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at SUNY-Buffalo. He teaches fundamentals of electric circuits for non-majors and conducts educational research in undergraduate engineering related to problem-solving and hands-on activities in the classroom. Presentacion is collaborating in a research project to understand the psychological links between spatial visualization skills and engineering problem solving while simultaneously establishing neurological evidence for these links. He is also involved in a proposal to develop a series of problem-solving activities through the lenses of Game-base Learning theoretical framework. His long-term goals are improving laboratory hands-on activities and students’ troubleshooting problem-solving skills.