Stepping Stones: Capacity building in engineering education (original) (raw)
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What is the word for'Engineering'in Swedish: Swedish students conceptions of their discipline
2007
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A Procedure for Analysing ESD Curricula Applied on Engineering Programmes at Swedish Universities
2013
There are several different methods for implementing curricular elements, but fairly few procedures for determining the success of the implementation. The central question is whether the student has mastered the desired set of skills and the expertise that fulfil the ambitions of the original policy documents. This paper presents a procedure for analyzing how ambitions related to education for sustainable development (ESD) are implemented in educational programmes, i.e. how political ambitions are cascaded down to the level that the student meets in the courses. The method was applied to the programmes in chemical engineering, mechanical engineering and engineering physics at two Swedish universities. The methodological framework is based on analyses of how ambitions on ESD are handled in texts in relevant documents at different levels and the relation between these. The selected texts were: the national degree ordinance, university policy documents, programme curricula, intended course learning outcomes, and learning assessment texts. While the study is focused on the inclusion of sustainable development competences in engineering education, the presented procedure should be general enough for application to any studied aspect of skills in a programme, in particular when this skill is developed in several different courses. The described procedure can also be used to monitor changes over time.
Journal of Peer Learning, 2010
The study presents an evaluation of the SI program in five engineering programs within the Faculty of Engineering (LTH) based on data from questionnaires to SI participants and SI-Leaders, credits taken by the students during the first year, and average grade data from high school for the first year students. The results show that participation in SI sessions markedly improves the chances of student success in studies during the first year. Furthermore, there are clear indications that the SI program creates a positive social introduction to engineering studies. The SI sessions also improve the participants' study techniques and develop common skills important for the engineer, such as problem solving, group work, and presenting/discussing results.
European Journal of Engineering Education, 2016
We investigated research processes applied in recent publications in the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), exploring how papers link to theoretical work and how research processes have been designed and reported. We analysed all 155 papers published in EJEE in 2009, 2010 and 2013, classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). The majority of the papers presented either empirical work (59%) or were case reports (27%). Our main findings are as follows: (1) EJEE papers build moderately on a wide selection of theoretical work; (2) a great majority of papers have a clear research strategy, but data analysis methods are mostly simple descriptive statistics or simple/undocumented qualitative research methods; and (3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research questions, methodology and limitations of studies. Our findings are consistent with and extend analyses of EER papers in other publishing venues; they help to build a clearer picture of the research currently published in EJEE and allow us to make recommendations for consideration by the editorial team of the journal. Our employed procedure also provides a framework that can be applied to monitor future global evolution of this and other EER journals.
2018
We have developed and performed a Teacher Professional Development (TPD) programme for introducing and implementing engineering in the primary and lower secondary school in Denmark. Engineering is a newcomer in Danish schools, and we only had fuzzy ideas about how to introduce it when we started. We, therefore, designed the TPD with an initial development and test phase where teachers acted as co-developers of teaching materials and didactic models. We monitored the process by teacher surveys and interviews, classroom observations and students surveys. The overall project design helped us to optimize didactic models, teaching materials and TPD activities through two iterative cycles before upscaling dissemination and teacher training.
Social Sciences in Engineering Education
The last few decades have seen many changes in how different groups in society perceive the terms “engineer” or “engineering”. While these terms are used mainly for applied fields of knowledge, they are now, however, not restricted only to hard science as was previously the case. Moreover, the engineers while exercising their profession are no longer confined in factories, construction sites, or design offices, but are more and more exposed to intensive human contacts in sometimes unexpected contexts. These major changes had a direct implication on the vision we historically had about engineering and engineers and have influenced the way decision makers came to look at engineering education. What precedes raises the following questions: Do we need a new approach to engineering curriculum in the near future? What flexibility do we have to adopt strategically to make this approach respond to societal demands? And finally, what international consensus is needed to recognize the regional and national specificities while assessing the quality of the delivered programs? In this presentation, and relying mainly (but not only) on the Lebanese context (the graduates of the Lebanese Schools of Engineering play an important and significant role throughout the Middle East), we emphasize the importance of adopting a new approach to engineering education and try to develop certain main axis of change in the curriculum. The paper will focus on the following points: 1. The first part will be devoted to describing the actual status of engineering education and the social needs for widening its educational objectives. 2. The second part will deal with the learning outcomes and competencies that engineers should acquire before graduating, and the needs for a multi-faced engineering education to respond to the changing demands of the labor market. This will imply a flexible structure of the curriculum, mainly in terms of content and of learning methodologies. 3. In the last part, we will elaborate the importance of an international recognition of this approach to engineering education in order to ensure its quality and to avoid penalizing institutions that choose to respond to such societal needs. The presentation will be based not only on a literature review but also on interviews with stakeholders, fresh graduates, head of companies etc.
Journal of Peer Learning, 2010
The study presents an evaluation of the SI program in five engineering programs within the Faculty of Engineering (LTH) based on data from questionnaires to SI participants and SI-Leaders, credits taken by the students during the first year, and average grade data from high school for the first year students. The results show that participation in SI sessions markedly improves the chances of student success in studies during the first year. Furthermore, there are clear indications that the SI program creates a positive social introduction to engineering studies. The SI sessions also improve the participants' study techniques and develop common skills important for the engineer, such as problem solving, group work, and presenting/discussing results.
2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
He completed his PhD degree majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Engineering Education and minoring in Educational Psychology as well as an MS degree in Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University. He also obtained an MEd degree from Clemson University. His research interests focus on teacher education and students learning issues within Engineering Education/Pedagogy and Computational Thinking/Pedagogy field of studies. He received national and international recognitions including an Early Career Researcher award from European Science Education Research Association (ESERA) and a Jhumki Basu Scholar award from National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST). In addition, he is one of two scholarship recipients awarded by NARST to attend the ESERA summer research program inČeské Budějovice, Czech Republic in 2016. He can be reached at