The national efforts underway to include engineering in K-12 science education present a variety of new challenges, including how to prepare teachers to teach a new discipline. In this paper, we focus on elementary teachers and how they enter into "responsive teaching," in which they closely attend and meaningfully respond to students'…

This mixed methods study examines perspectives on failure in the classroom by elementary teachers new to teaching engineering. The study participants included 254 teachers in third, fourth, and fifth grade who responded to survey questions about failure, as well as a subset of 38 of those teachers who participated in interviews about failure. The…

This study forms part of a collaboration project between universities in South Africa and Sweden in which we investigate whether the emphasis in undergraduate mathematics courses for engineering students would benefit from being more conceptually oriented than a traditional more procedurally oriented way of teaching. In this paper, we report in…

Engineers today need both engineering knowledge and social science knowledge to solve complex problems. However, most people have a traditional view of engineering as a field dominated by math and science foci, with little social consequence. This study examined and compared perceptions about engineering from Freshmen taking three different First…

The ability to solve problems with people of diverse backgrounds is essential for engineering graduates. A course on engineering grand challenges was designed to promote collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills. One unique component is that students need to work both within their own team and collaborate with the other team to tackle engineering…

Soft skills are some of the skills needed to ensure that graduates fulfill the needs of the job market. Until 2010, almost 30% of unemployed graduates in Malaysia are technical graduates and one third comes are graduates from polytechnic. Most engineering graduates are proficient in technical skills but lack in soft skills. The lack of relevant…

Background: Learning processes are usually characterized by students' misunderstandings and misconceptions. Engineering educators intend to help their students overcome their misconceptions and achieve correct understanding of the concept. This paper describes a misconception in digital systems held by many students who believe that combinational…

Although engineering education research has empirically validated the effectiveness of active learning in improving student learning over traditional lecture-based methods, the adoption of active learning in classrooms has been slow. One of the greatest reported barriers is student resistance towards engagement in active learning exercises. This…

This paper reports on a study about how the mathematics textbook was perceived and used by the teacher in the context of a calculus part of a basic mathematics course for first-year engineering students. The focus was on the teacher's choices and the use of definitions, examples and exercises in a sequence of lectures introducing the derivative…

Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools and processes are increasingly adopted and implemented in the construction industry. Consequently, BIM education is considered increasingly important in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) education. While most of the research and literature on BIM education in engineering studies has focused…

In spite of considerable evidence of the effectiveness of active learning and other contemporary teaching methods, barriers to adoption of those methods, such as possible student resistance, continue to exist. This study addresses student resistance by analyzing data from 1,051 students who completed our Student Response to Instructional Practices…

There are strong classroom ties between mathematics and the sciences of physics and chemistry, but those ties seem weaker between mathematics and biology. Practicing biologists realize both that there are interesting mathematics problems in biology, and that viewing classroom biology in the context of another discipline could support students'…

Despite more than thirty years of the underrepresentation of women in engineering being a persistent concern, research on the cause of the problem has not been successful in reversing the trend. A plethora of theories as to why females are not entering engineering exist, yet they only address issues on the surface and do not attend to a…

Now the demand for skilled labor is urgent. Development of skilled labor has been done in various ways either through education and training. Indonesia, especially North Sumatra state nurture some vocational schools that produce graduates which are expected to be ready for working, but have not been able to meet these expectations. Therefore we…

Engineering has been slowly integrated into K-12 science classrooms in the United States as the result of recent science education reforms. Such changes in science teaching require that a science teacher is confident with and committed to content, practices, language, and cultures related to both science and engineering. However, from the…