Engineering organizations are increasingly under pressure to perform more efficiently with fewer people. To manage this, organizations need to understand what skills, knowledge and behaviours they need from engineers who have to practise in a global information society. Engineering educators, in collaboration with employers, therefore now need to…

Provides job descriptions, outlines academic preparation, compares personal and job-related factors, and describes operations of a technical team for four occupations: scientists, engineers, engineering technologists, and engineering technicians. (SK)

This study focuses on the analysis of the behavior of unbound aggregates to offset wheel loads. Test data from full-scale aircraft gear loading conducted at the National Airport Pavement Test Facility (NAPTF) by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are used to investigate the effects of wander (offset loads) on the deformation behavior of…

The study examined whether sociocontextual and sociocognitive variables explained the choice goals of 339 Racial Ethnic Minority and White engineering undergraduate students using a modified version of Lent et al.'s (1994) social cognitive career theory. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that the hypothesized model did not…

Who persists in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields? Looking for ways to increase persistence rates, the authors frequently look for the characteristics that differentiate persisters and non-persisters. However, the choice to persist may not be as binary as these two terms would imply. The research reported here begins to…

The Research Experience for Teachers was designed to help high school science teachers develop skills and knowledge in research, science and engineering with a focus on the area of pharmaceutical particulate and composite systems. The experience included time for the development of instructional modules for classroom teaching. Results of the…

This paper presents a new pedagogical method for nodal analysis optimization based on the use of virtual current sources, applicable to any linear electric circuit (LEC), regardless of its complexity. The proposed method leads to straightforward solutions, mostly arrived at by inspection. Furthermore, the method is easily adapted to computer…

The purpose of this article is to present a model of academic motivation that can be used by instructors to design courses that will engage students in learning. The model, based on research and theory, consists of five components that an instructor should consider when designing instruction: (1) empowerment, (2) usefulness, (3) success, (4)…

You may not think of engineering and squirt guns in the same sentence. However, like many examples of engineering design, the squirt gun pump mechanism is uncomplicated, yet elegant, and very inexpensive to manufacture. The design is widely used because of its simplicity and low cost. With only a few moving parts, it is able to deliver a stream of…

Many published studies examine the effectiveness of Google Scholar (Scholar) as an index for scholarly articles. This paper analyzes the value of Scholar in finding and labeling online full text of articles using titles from the citations of engineering faculty publications. For the fields of engineering and the engineering colleges in the study,…

Current engineering applications in the medical arena are extremely progressive. However, it is rather difficult for medical doctors and engineers to discuss issues because they do not always understand one another's jargon or ways of thinking. Ideally, medical engineers should become acquainted with medicine, and engineers should be able to…

Media--text, images, audio, and video--underwent a transformation from analog to digital formats during the transition from the 20th to the 21st century. Digital media can easily be replicated, downloaded, revised, edited, and reposted, and the implications of this are affecting education, government, entertainment, culture, and society. The…

We examined two curricular change efforts at a small, midwestern engineering and science college in order to explore how organizational culture influences curricular change processes. We found that the failure of one effort (measured by inability to sustain the curriculum over time) and the success of the other (the curriculum continues to be…

Based on previous empirical studies, in this work the author presents an analysis of the role of context in academic capitalism. In particular, she argues that the literature on academic capitalism fails to properly acknowledge disciplinary and institutional differences, which results in an oversimplification of the effects of industry-academia…

This article discusses the open-content movement in education. A small but growing movement of K-12 educators is latching on to educational resources that are "open," or free for others to use, change, and republish on web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy…