Dublin Institute of Technology offers students a number of different routes into engineering, allowing many non-standard entrants the opportunity to study the discipline provided they fulfil certain criteria. The final aim of many of these students is to achieve an Honours Degree in Engineering, which takes a minimum of 4 years. Apart from the…

Game-based learning (GBL) combines pedagogy and interactive entertainment to create a virtual learning environment in an effort to motivate and regain the interest of a new generation of "digital native" learners. However, this approach is impeded by the limited availability of suitable "serious" games and high-level design…

This study examines the trend of foreign doctorate recipients from U.S. higher education institutions who decided to stay in the United States after their degree completion, and it explores individual, institutional, and country factors predicting whether the foreign doctorate recipients stay in the United States or return home. Analyzing data…

Background: Engineering educators and practitioners increasingly value contextual competence. A psychometrically sound, practical, and useful scale for assessing undergraduate engineering students' contextual competence is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This article provides comprehensive evidence of the content, structural, discriminant, and…

Background: Research regarding international female engineering graduate students tends to be aggregated with that about the experiences of international students in the United States or as the struggles of female engineers in engineering disciplines. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand the unique experiences of international female…

Background: Concept inventories (CIs) are commonly used in engineering disciplines to assess students' conceptual understanding and to evaluate instruction, but educators often use CIs without sufficient evidence that a structured approach has been applied to validate inferences about student thinking. Purpose: We propose an analytic framework for…

Many university-level electrical engineering courses continue to use textbooks as curriculum scaffolds, prescribed texts, and/or reference volumes. Textbook reliance is even more pronounced in courses that teach foundational principles of the discipline, such as introductory circuit theory. This paper reports on the conceptual coverage of…

Understanding the advantages, risks, and financial costs of medical technology is one way that technologically literate citizens can make better-informed decisions regarding their health and medical care. A cascade of advancements in medical imaging technologies (Ulmer & Jansen 2010) offers an exciting backdrop from which to help students…

Can anonymous written feedback collected during classroom assessment activities be used to assess students' cognitive development levels? After library instruction in a first-year engineering design class, students submitted minute papers that included answers to "what they are left wondering." Responses were coded into low, medium and…

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing…

Engineering is not a subject that has historically been taught in elementary schools, but with the emphasis on engineering in the "Next Generation Science Standards," curricula are being developed to explicitly teach engineering content and design. However, many of the scientific investigations already conducted with students have…

This study explored the quality of arguments used by first-year engineering university students enrolled in a traditional physics course dealing with electromagnetic induction and related problem solving where they had to assess whether the electromagnetic induction phenomenon would occur. Their conclusions were analyzed for the relevance of the…

Most past and current learning technologies have been one- or two-dimensional in presentation. This may be fine if one is looking at a map or even a fine painting. However, to fully appreciate the detail of a statue or a machine part, it is better to be able to look at it from all sides. Use of holographic images allows an item to be shared with a…

The manipulation of the natural world in the form of plant materials to design, control, and grow desirable agricultural commodities was central to the establishment and advancement of civilization. Modern developments in genetically modified organisms (GMOs or biologically engineered foods) can trace their origins to macro practices developed and…

A strong, systematic and well-executed management system will be able to minimize and coordinate workload. A number of committees need to be developed, which are joined by the department staffs to achieve the objectives that have been set. Another important aspect is the monitoring department in order to ensure that the work done is correct and in…