In the Iranian higher education system, including engineering education, effective implementation of cooperative learning is difficult because classrooms are usually crowded and the students never had a formal group working background in their previous education. In order to achieve the benefits of cooperative learning in this condition, this…

Studies suggest that at engineering universities, where the percentage of males and engineering majors is high, pro-environmental attitudes are likely to be weak and may not change. The 15-item New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale was used to measure differences in student attitudes before and after an environmental studies course. Results revealed…

ABET requires that engineering programs demonstrate continuous assessment and continuous improvement in order to be accredited. Central to the process is establishing and assessing measurable "student outcomes" that reflect whether the goals and objectives of the program are being met. This paper examines effective strategies for…

Background: This article reports on an analysis of errors that were displayed by students who studied mathematics in Chemical Engineering in derivatives of mostly trigonometric functions. The poor performance of these students triggered this study. The researcher (lecturer) works in a mathematics support programme to enhance students'…

This pilot study evaluated users' perceptions of the effectiveness of the VineUp platform to match mentors from a large United States manufacturing firm and mechanical engineering students in an honors program at a small private university. Four mentor/mentee pairs were surveyed and interviewed at the end of the nine-month program. Although the…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a programme that is attached to difficult courses with the objective of increasing student performance and retention. However, an SI programme also has the potential to increase overall student performance and retention during the first critical year if applied to introductory courses. In this study the latter…

Threshold concepts are transformative, integrative, and provocative; understanding these difficult concepts allows students to be capable of solving advanced problems. This investigation and evaluation of a metacognitive curricular approach explore variation in students' and teachers' discernment of structural complexity of concepts and its…

This paper proposes lab work for learning fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in mechatronic systems. These skills are important for engineering education because FDD is a key capability of competitive processes and products. The intended outcome of the lab work is that students become aware of the importance of faulty conditions and learn to…

The thermodynamic formalism of ideal solutions is developed in most of the textbooks postulating a form for the chemical potential of a generic component, which is adapted from the thermodynamics of ideal gas mixtures. From this basis, the rest of useful thermodynamic properties can be derived straightforwardly without further hypothesis. Although…

Biology is playing an increasingly important role in the chemical engineering curriculum. We describe a set of experiments we have implemented in our Undergraduate Laboratory course giving students practical insights into membrane separation processes for protein processing. The goal of the lab is to optimize the purification and concentration of…

This chapter discusses a mixed-methods study of personal and programmatic factors that affected persistence of Latina graduate engineering students at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). The study's findings enabled us to share recommendations that may be useful to HSIs and other colleges and universities.

Context: It is common practice in academia to have students work with "toy" projects in software engineering (SE) courses. One way to make such courses more realistic and reduce the gap between academic courses and industry needs is getting students involved in open source projects (OSP) with faculty supervision. Objective: This study…

This study reports the results of a meta-analysis synthesizing the available literature on the effectiveness of various forms of small-group learning methods on the academic achievement of college students in undergraduate engineering and technology classrooms. The meta-analytic results showed that cooperative learning, collaborative learning,…

Results from a number of studies indicate that the use of drafting models can positively influence the spatial visualization ability for engineering technology students. However, additional variables such as light, temperature, motion and color can play an important role but research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a set of 5…

This paper proposed the affordance approach of material, affective and social dimensions so as to explore the learners' engagement and disposition to share of using mobile learning technology. The participants in this study were graduate-level engineering students (N = 387) from a research university in People's Republic of China. "Rain…