Search Results for
"Engineering education"

Recent developments in computing and mobile technologies have enabled the mobile and ubiquitous learning approach, which situates students in an environment that combines real-world and digital-world learning resources. Although such an approach seems to be innovative and interesting, several problems have been revealed when applying it to practical learning activities. One major problem is owing to the lack of proper learning strategies or tools that can guide or assist the students to learn in such a complex learning scenario. Students might feel excited or interested when using the mobile devices to learn in the real world; however, their learning achievements could be disappointing. To cope with this problem, in this study, a knowledge engineering approach is proposed to develop Mindtools for such innovative learning scenarios. Experimental results from a natural science course of an elementary school show that this innovative approach not only enhances learning motivation, but also improves the learning achievements of the students. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The U.S. has experienced a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one that overwhelmingly provides services and information. This shift demands that technological skills be more fully integrated with one's academic knowledge of science and mathematics so that the next generation of engineers can reason adaptively, think critically, and be prepared to learn how to learn. Project Lead the Way (PLTW) provides a pre-college curriculum that focuses on the integration of engineering with science and mathematics. We documented the impact that enrollment in PLTW had on student science and math achievement. We consider the enriched integration hypothesis, which states that students taking PLTW courses will show achievement benefits, after controlling for prior achievement and other student and teacher characteristics. We contrast this with alternative hypotheses that propose little or no impact of the engineering coursework on students' math and science achievement (the insufficient integration hypothesis), or that PLTW enrollment might be negatively associated with student achievement (the adverse integration hypothesis). Using multilevel statistical modeling with students (N-140) nested within teachers, we report findings from a quantitative analysis of the relationship between PLTW enrollment and student achievement on state standardized tests of math and science. While students gained in math and science achievement overall from eighth to tenth grade, students enrolled in PLTW foundation courses showed significantly smaller math assessment gains than those in a matched group that did not enroll, and no measurable advantages on science assessments, when controlling for prior achievement and teacher experience. The findings do not support the enriched integration hypothesis. engineering education programs like PLTW face both challenges and opportunities to effectively integrate academic content as they strive to prepare students for college engineering programs and careers. © 2010.

Improving the effectiveness of eAssessment depends on the knowledge and experience of feedback-givers. This paper describes an indirect approach to improving feedback for learners - training the feedback-giver while actually preparing the feedback for the learners. Specifically, the aim is to help inexperienced teaching assistants (TAs) who lack training in how to provide quality feedback. The approach emphasises the ways in which feedback is organised through the use of feedback patterns. There is evidence that students in higher education, like adult learners, require improved feedback to make their learning more efficient. McFeSPA (metacognitive feedback scaffolding system for pedagogical apprenticeship) was designed and implemented as efeedback to help improve the TAs' feedback skills while marking programming assignments - and then evaluated to determine whether TAs could benefit from automated feedback. The evaluation involves examining the system with scaffolding turned off to help three TAs give feedback to a group of students and scaffolding turned on for three TAs using the full system. The results are broadly favourable. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Teaching faculty is the most valuable resource, the pivot around which the whole teaching and learning process revolves in an educational institution. The shortage of quality faculty is currently acknowledged as the most critical problem and finding enough competent and qualified faculties is becoming a growing challenge for engineering institutions, as they have to compete with their counterparts in India and abroad, in curriculum and teaching standards. A synoptic view of the main factors behind the shortage, its impacts in the quality of education and strategies required for maintaining quality and balancing the demand and supply of teaching faculty in technical institutions are delved in this paper. The analysis also highlights the core competency of engineering teachers, the present scenario of teaching faculty, the state-wise magnitude of shortage and the educational profile of teaching faculty at all-India level. The research gives a national perspective on the problem and adds further investigation into various facets and illuminates its impacts on the quality of education. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

This paper presents the results from a study undertaken to improve the teaching and learning effectiveness in engineering education courses, specifically for Technical and Vocational education (TVE) system in Bahrain. A teaching and learning assessment tool was developed for participants (existing TVE teachers in electrical and electronic engineering and a pilot group of TVE students). The purpose was to examine the existing approaches of teaching and learning practised in TVE educational environment as well as learning styles preferred by TVE students. The results confirmed that TVE teachers applied limited methods of teaching and learning. However, TVE students had widely varying learning preferences, as they are more motivated by using the experiential learning approach. The experiential learning model allowed students to make their own learning choices and relate what they were learning to the real-work applications (using diagrams, hyperlinked text, video, pictures, interactive examples, virtual reality simulations, and animations). Based on the drawn conclusions, a teaching and learning guideline for engineering education was originated specifically for the needs of the TVE system in Bahrain. The guideline is a potential tool for structuring and improving engineering learning courses in TVE. The guideline will also help in meeting modern industrial requirements by equipping students with better skills, abilities and attitude. © Common Ground, Mohamed Alseddiqi, Rakesh Mishra, Salah Mahdi Abdulrasool.

The chapters constituting this volume were all originally papers contributed to the Fifth International Basil Bernstein Symposium at Cardiff University, Wales in July 2008. They reflect the continuing vibrancy of the worldwide work that characterises the application of his ideas to educational policy and practice. Their diversity is evident, while their common thread is continuing devotion, noted in earlier volumes, to ‘putting Bernsteinian concepts to work’ (Moore et al., 2006). They could not possibly reflect the complete range of Fifth Symposium presentations but do illustrate how relevant Bernstein’s concerns are in offering insight to our contemporary troubles. More than a third of the papers offered at the symposium concerned aspects of crisis and change in higher education and almost all, in one way or another, addressed issues of identity and consciousness in relation to knowledge formation, transition and acquisition. This is reflected in the structure of this volume where most of this Introduction is devoted to anatomising aspects of Bernstein’s analysis of the origins of the university and its continuity with contemporary shifts from disciplinarity to trainability and in Part II, ‘Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms’, where a series of empirical studies give accounts of changing knowledge structures in university contexts in teacher education in Greece, engineering, Physics and Anthropology in Iceland, Media Studies and Journalism in South Africa and contrasting occupational preparation in higher education (HE) and Vocational education and Training (VET) in Australia. These analyses rest foursquare on fundamental questions explored by Bernstein concerning what knowledge is and how it is produced and made available which are taken up by Maton, Muller and Frandji and Vitale, the contributors to Part I, ‘Knowledge and knowers in late modernity’, each focusing upon big, theoretical issues of what is thinkable in any particular era and its relationship to individual and group subjectivities and identities. Each, indicatively, argues for the greater theoretical, empirical and problem-solving power of Bernstein’s work than that of his contemporary Bourdieu. In turn, Part III, ‘Multiply anchored subjectivities’, focuses on elaborating some recent conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment that celebrate both the openness of Bernstein’s work to other disciplinary approaches and its anchorage in class inscription. These are illustrated by Lapping’s exploration of his use of Kleinian notions of identity, Evans and others’ claim that modification of his notion of the ‘pedagogic device’ provides new and interesting ways of relating biology and culture and Gamble and Hoadley’s analysis of classroom pedagogic control that, like the work of Morais and her associates, reminds us that the institutionalisation and operation of personal modalities in our schools will not necessarily secure access for all children to vertical knowledge forms. The outstanding characteristics of Bernstein’s vision of pedagogic processes concern their pervasiveness, connectedness and intimacy of relation to social and cultural hierarchy, power and control. He was very fond of saying that while the differences that marked the natural and social worlds were endless sources of fascination, it was the invidious ranking of the crucial categories of class, gender, race, region and religion that underlay our need to understand ‘both the creation, management and legitimation of specialized differences and the creation, management and legitimation of various social inequalities’ through schooling and other social agencies and that this involved ‘analyzing the complex inter-relations between education, stratification, economy and the various principles and arrangements of the State’ (Bernstein, 1981: n.p.). His own view of where the script for doing so should start, ‘even where the plot is not worked out and half the characters are missing’, lay in Durkheim’s representation of the contradictory dynamic ‘of the two discourses upon which the medieval university was founded, that of Christianity and that of Greek thought’ (Bernstein, 1996: 82). In a world where universities are required to service society and demonstrate their functional use, Bernstein’s sociology allows modern anxieties about shifts in conceptions of knowledge from sacred to secular, content to skills and text to hypermedia to be placed within a long historical trajectory. His work on the origins of knowledge in ancient Greek universities and changes in the classification and framing of formal knowledge across eras places the information revolution of late modernity in context. While contemporary educational policy rhetoric calls for a radical rethinking of school and university curricula by conjuring terms such as ‘generic skills’, a historical perspective grounds such debates in issues of subjectivity, learning and the limits to the possibilities for knowing in late modernity. Asking what kind of knowledge is needed for the future raises anxieties; knowing futures is an art that we have not yet mastered (Adam and Groves, 2007). Perhaps, instead, our starting point should be rethinking the question, ‘what is education for?' Bernstein (2001: 382) points out that education is controlled and increasingly micro-managed by the state. Whereas the last time we had a totally pedagogised society in the medieval period, when the Catholic Church dominated social life, now schools, universities and other statesponsored institutions increasingly serve the needs of government and remind us not to ‘confuse opportunity with democracy’ (ibid.). Pedagogic panic has masked moral panic and new discourses of pedagogy, ignoring content and focusing only on competencies, risk its reduction to technology and learning becoming completely decontextualised from the rest of acquirers’ life spans. What Bernstein feared most of all was the ‘socially empty’, neo-liberal notion of ‘trainability’ (ibid.: 366), inscribed in ‘life long learning’ rhetoric as ‘creativity and adaptability’ (ibid.: 368), reminding us that the need for pedagogy to be meaningful as well as relevant provides one of our greatest challenges, requiring us to reintroduce issues about content and epistemology into educational debates. In times of weak global and strong pedagogic states we need to look outside formal to informal, adult or popular education ‘outside of the State [where] there’s a possibility for change and initiative’ (ibid.: 382). It is in the interest of pursuing such themes that I now turn in this Introduction to a brief elaboration of Bernstein and other’s views of pedagogic origins, before returning to outline in more detail the nature of the other contributions contained in this volume, where Muller suggests that discussions within education about epistemology have tended to be limited to scientific knowledge, suggesting that we have not yet worked out the full ramifications of Durkheim’s discussion of the Greek curriculum. The humanities constitute the modern Trivium, and can be characterised as disciplines that develop inner consciousness or sensibility. The sciences are disciplines that investigate the outer world, and analyses of the two, involving changes both in knowledge and pedagogy, have not yet been properly conjoined. Even more importantly, what appears to have been left out of current debates and analysis about the purpose of education is the role it plays in the formation of consciousness. In asking what education is for we need to consider social organisation and knowledge more adequately. Knowledge that was produced outside the university in guilds and crafts is attracting increasing attention (e.g. Sennett, 2008) and apprenticeship is being reinvented as the way forward in many education policy documents. In this analysis, early forms of community and institutionalised educational practice, such as existed in monasteries and craft workshops, will be used to explore relationships between curriculum, pedagogy and consciousness that help us to think about knowledge and knowers in late modernity. © 2011 Gabrielle Ivinson, Brian Davies and John Fitz for selection and editorial material. Individual chapters, the contributors.

Conventional technical education has been implemented within an apprenticeship system; however, the framework to support this system is now collapsing. Today, the technical education of plasterers is often implemented using training methods far removed from those of the conventional apprenticeship system.However, in Japan, the training of technicians has been left to subcontractors; this has resulted in a lack of consistency, and this approach is now in a state of neglect.In the West, vocational education is provided in schools, and technical training is implemented through collaboration between educational institutions and the corporate sector.The modern building industry is characterized by major advances in construction technology and the challenge of new building technologies. In view of this, there is a need to train top-class plasterers who are capable of adapting to a constantly changing work environment.Unlike other occupations, the work of plasterers can be divided into three categories, each with a unique work description and work methods.The work description of an advanced-level plasterer is to perform plastering work requiring advanced skills (that is, work that only a skilled craftsman or supervisor can handle), to work with clients and engineers to propose technical solutions and coordinate work processes, and to train, instruct, and guide young and subordinate workers.In order to perform these activities, advanced-level plasterers must have the management skills to provide appropriate and timely instruction, guidance, and proposals on-site. In September 2007, upon completion of a Kanto-area seminar, I conduced a questionnaire survey of participants.The seminar enabled participants to efficiently learn communication and leadership management skills through off-the-job training and brainstorming.This paper clarifies and presents one aspect of educational methods for training subcontractor technicians-a subject that has been somewhat neglected up to now.On the basis of these concepts, the first objective of this study is to raise specific issues in relation to vocational education and personnel development-the cultivation of plasterers to perform plaster work, one of the main kinds of subcontract work in Japanese construction projects-and to describe a method for training building-industry technicians that enables the acquisition of occupational ranks according to the individual's stage of skill development, in line with a model system (from hiring to the attainment of the highest technical qualification) for the current employment of plasterers). © Chinese Research Institute of Construction Management.

This paper aims to describe how to support the development of expertise in a multi-disciplinary setting in one technical university in Finland. The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of what expertise is and how to promote such expertise through doctoral education. There is a need to create interdisciplinary skills for complex global environments in engineering education. Therefore, a multidisciplinary doctoral programme combining both humanities and engineering disciplines, specifically in industrial engineering, provides a great opportunity to study scientific expertise. The implications of this paper provide a greater understanding of how university departments can support doctoral students during their journey to becoming professional scientists and experts. The review shows that the scholarly community plays an important role in fostering new experts through doctoral education. Earlier, doctors were seen as wise men in a factual sense; today's doctors and those of the future are seen as having skills and knowledge to work within communities that build up expertise in collaboration. Expertise is not one man's property but is developed in a network of actors in social environments. The structures of doctoral education support the earlier view of expertise. However, these structures should be changed in order better to promote the development of expertise as understood today. In order to promote the development of the scientific expertise of doctoral students, more collaborative approaches should be adopted during doctoral education. Doctoral students should be encouraged to take on the role of an active agent in the scholarly community in its broad sense. Students should participate actively in scientific conferences and other professional meetings from the early stages of their studies.