Engineering educators are being challenged to create learning environments that not only teach technical skills, but also foster higher-order thinking skills and instill professional attributes. Problem-based learning has been proposed as an effective method to prepare our future engineers. However, pedagogical innovations, like PBL, disrupt…

This paper describes a joint programme developed in 2018 by the University of Parma Language Centre (Italy) and the Humanities and Arts Department of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The aim of the project was to involve students of English for General Academic Purposes in delivering presentations to an unfamiliar foreign audience on a…

Student learning inventories are used by both researchers and educators as tools to identify "at risk" students. This article critically interrogates the results of one of these inventories, the 18-item Approaches to Learning and Studying Inventory. In-depth interviews were held with a purposive sample of 10 first-year engineering…

Background: Conceptual understanding is a prerequisite for engineering competence. Concept maps may be effective tools for assessing conceptual knowledge, yet further work is needed to examine scoring methods. Purpose: Our purpose was to evaluate the efficacy of three concept map scoring methods. Traditional scoring requires judges to count…

Science and mathematics education in Ireland is facing an increasing number of challenges due to economic and social change. Some of these challenges mirror international trends while others are unique to the Irish education system. In order to meet the demands that are being placed on science and mathematics education in Ireland at post-primary…

Precious moments in life for an educator are taking time to reflect upon his or her teaching practices to evaluate effectiveness and overall impact. Often this reflection is a weekly if not a daily process for educators using a reflective practitioner model (SchÖn, 1983). For professors, many universities have opportunities for tenured faculty to…

In this study, the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century identified by the National Academy of Engineering were examined by a panel of experts in an effort to identify prospective curricular integration opportunities in the field of technology and engineering education. The study utilized a three-round modified Delphi methodology…

Cheating in examinations transpires in every-country of the world, and it is a fraudulent-behavior that involves some-form of deception, in which a candidate's efforts, or the efforts of other-candidates, are altered; it has negative educational, social and psychological-effects. Even though cheating is widespread, it has been observed that…

Materials science--the science of stuff--has made our lives better by making it possible for manufacturers to supply us with products. Students have misconceptions about materials use. Many may think using bottled water, for example, is harmless because they recycle the plastic empties, but they fail to consider the resources and energy used to…

"Designing backwards" is presented here as a means to utilize human-centered processes in diverse educational settings to help teachers and students learn to formulate and operate design processes to achieve three sequential and interrelated goals. The first entails teaching them to effectively and empathetically identify, frame and…

We investigated the extent to which the observed gender differences in mental rotation ability among the 2,468 freshmen studying engineering at a Midwest public university attributed to the gender bias of a test. The Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (Revised PSVT:R) is a spatial test frequently used to measure…

Successive governments have pledged to enhance the quality of apprenticeship in Britain so as to achieve "parity of esteem" with academic study. Yet, at the same time, the discourse of the academic-vocational divide has dominated the academic, policy-maker and practitioner debates. This paper draws on two recent studies designed to…

Today there are a number of 3D printing technologies that are low cost and within the budgets of middle and high school programs. Educational technology companies offer a variety of 3D printing technologies and parallel curriculum materials to enable technology and engineering teachers to easily add 3D learning activities to their programs.…

This paper asks the question: do people with different levels of research productivity and identification as a researcher think of research differently? It discusses a study that differentiated levels of research productivity among English and Australian academics working in research-intensive environments in three broad discipline areas: science,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to define the concept of "convergence thinking" as a trading zone for knowledge fusion in the engineering field, and develops its measuring scale. Design/ Methodology/Approach: Based on results from literature review, this study clarifies a theoretical ground for "convergence thinking."…