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1.
Many engineering undergraduates begin third-level education with significant deficiencies in their core mathematical skills. Every year, in the Dublin Institute of Technology, a diagnostic test is given to incoming first-year students, consistently revealing problems in basic mathematics. It is difficult to motivate students to address these problems; instead, they struggle through their degree, carrying a serious handicap of poor core mathematical skills, as confirmed by exploratory testing of final year students. In order to improve these skills, a pilot project was set up in which a ‘module’ in core mathematics was developed. The course material was basic, but 90% or higher was required to pass. Students were allowed to repeat this module throughout the year by completing an automated examination on WebCT populated by a question bank. Subsequent to the success of this pilot with third-year mechanical engineering students, the project was extended to five different engineering programmes, across three different year-groups. Full results and analysis of this project are presented, including responses to interviews carried out with a selection of the students involved.  相似文献   

2.
Students in the Physiotherapy Programme carried out a group project in their final year of studies. The objectives of the project were that the students learn and appreciate the process and activities involved in research, acquire deeper understanding of a topic in their professional interest, learn to work as a team, manage their own time, collaborate with others and produce a meaningful report. In the case of group work, usually the written report is assessed and the same mark is given to all members. Sometimes the supervisors’ and group members’ assessment of the members’ involvement and participation in the project, oral presentation or viva voce contributes a small portion to the final grade of each student. This practice is limited to the assessment of the outcome of the group effort and does not reflect the process of learning by individual members. Portfolio assessment of learning involves the students themselves reflecting on and evaluating their learning and also allows teachers to evaluate individual students’ learning in group tasks. In this paper, the implementation of the portfolio assessment, the criteria for the assessment of the portfolios and the students’ opinions on the portfolio assessment are discussed.  相似文献   

3.
The need for engineering design students to understand that creativity is an important part of their educational development and also for a sound basis for their future role in industry has been well established. This paper will discuss the foundations of engineering design within this context and highlight the problems confronting students who are required to make a creative input to a design problem and describe a view on how to implement ‘creativityrsquo; in teaching engineering design through the experiences learnt while undertaking an interdepartmental project. The motivation for this work has arisen from the need to improve a student's ability to think creatively and in the long term, to improve the design of future products. Experiences from teaching creativity within an interdepartmental project will be given.  相似文献   

4.
ABSTRACT

In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question ‘What do you understand by mathematical creativity?’. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that ‘problem solving’ category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were ‘involving mathematics’ category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for ‘problem solving’ and ‘involving mathematics’ categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees.  相似文献   

5.
This paper presents data from a project that aims to determine the level of knowledge and understanding of engineering students about sustainable development (SD). The data derive from a survey completed by final year engineering students in three Irish Higher Education Institutions. This paper is part of a larger study that examines the relationship between students’ and teachers’ understanding of SD. The results from the survey show that final year engineering students’ knowledge is deficient. The majority of the participants fail to acknowledge the complexity of the concept and focus on environmental protection. Their knowledge of legislation relevant to SD and the social aspect of sustainability is particularly deficient.  相似文献   

6.
In this paper we consider the ways in which students' activities during project work are influenced by their images of science, e.g. their views about the purposes of science, the nature of scientific knowledge and the role of social processes in scientific activity. We also investigate the kinds of project activities which promote the development of students' images of science. We draw on case studies of 11 science students' experiences of investigative project work in their final year at university. For one of these students naive views about the epistemology of science constrain her project activities. We suggest that the concept of 'epistemic demand' may help in anticipating difficulties that students might have during project work. We also find that students' images of science are developed as a result of messages communicated both implicitly and explicitly through project work.  相似文献   

7.
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8.
The course for the final year project for engineering students, because of its strongly research-based, open-ended format, tends to not have well defined learning outcomes, which are also not aligned with any accepted pedagogical philosophy or learning technology. To address this problem, the revised Bloom's taxonomy table of Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) is utilised, as suggested previously by Lee and Lai (2007), to design new learning outcomes for the final year project course in engineering education. Based on the expectations of the engineering graduate, and integrating these graduate expectations into the six cognitive processes and four knowledge dimensions of the taxonomy table, 24 learning outcomes have been designed. It is proposed that these 24 learning outcomes be utilised as a suitable working template to inspire more critical evaluation of what is expected to be learnt by engineering students undertaking final year research or capstone projects.  相似文献   

9.
The paper starts by emphasising that final year engineering projects are regarded important in the training and education of professional engineers in Australia and Europe. The sources of projects available to students were also mentioned. Some Australian universities insist on individual projects but some not, each with their own reasons. However, it can be argued that all European universities run individual projects. In most cases, whether it is in Australia or Europe, the total load for final year engineering projects is about 6.25% of the load of engineering programmes. Assessment methods were also described. They were all different whether in Australia or Europe but not very significant. It was discovered that literature reviews, oral presentations and written reports or dissertations were important elements in the assessment schemes. Many university staff, in both continents, encouraged students to publish their work in international conferences and journals if the originality of the projects was high. It can be argued that the individual project is most effective in learning outcome; however, the cost involved is also very high and its sustainability in smaller universities in Australia is in doubt.  相似文献   

10.
There is mounting evidence to show that engineers need more than technical skills to succeed in industry. This paper describes a curriculum innovation in which so-called ‘soft’ skills, specifically inter-personal and intra-personal skills, were integrated into a final year mining engineering course. The instructional approach was designed to promote independent learning and to develop non-technical skills, essential for students on the threshold of becoming practising engineers. Three psychometric tests were administered at the beginning of the course to make students aware of their own and their classmates’ characteristics. Substantial prescribed reading assignments preceded weekly group discussions. Several projects during the course required team work skills and application of content knowledge to real-world contexts. Results obtained from students’ reflection papers, assignments related to ‘soft’ skills and end of course evaluations suggest that students’ appreciation of the need for these skills, as well as their own perceived competence, increased during the course. Their ability to function as independent learners also increased.  相似文献   

11.
Changing the assessment method is a way to influence the students’ attitudes towards their studies; their ways of working to a large extent are determined by the assessment methods. One way to take advantage of this is to use the assessment to stimulate creativity and communication skills. This has been tried in full‐scale studies for students in engineering physics, computer science and mathematics at Uppsala University and Vdxjö University, both in Sweden. Undergraduate education in engineering, computer science and mathematics has by tradition emphasized training in skills. The examination often consists of problems that the students solve individually. It is difficult to give complex and/or loosely defined problems in such an examination. The students are not encouraged to analyze, judge, communicate or discuss these skills. In fact, in the authors’ experience, traditional examinations can actually inhibit the development of the students’ independence and creativity. Both projects have been supported by the Council for Renewal of Undergraduate Education, Sweden.  相似文献   

12.
Term‐time employment among Britain’s undergraduates is a growing phenomenon but it has received scant attention from government and policy makers. Although there are numerous studies on the subject, few have explored the impact of term‐time employment on students’ actual attainment and those that have are limited. This article attempts to fill that gap. Using data derived from 1000 students in six UK universities, it quantifies the impact of students’ paid work on their actual marks and degree results, while controlling for their academic attainment on entry to higher education and other factors including their hours of work. It shows that irrespective of the university students attended, term‐time working had a detrimental effect on both their final year marks and their degree results. The more hours students worked, the greater the negative effect. Consequently, students working the average number of hours a week were a third less likely to get a good degree than an identical non‐working student. Some of the least qualified and poorest students are most adversely affected perpetuating existing inequalities in HE. The 2006/07 changes to student finances may help some of them, but term‐time employment is likely to remain part of the HE landscape.  相似文献   

13.
I began this journey with the notion that creativity is somehow linked to having the freedom to explore and discover and dissemble and reassemble in whatever form we choose. This notion is compared with the ideas of researchers in the field of creativity. As an engineer who believes in a holistic approach, I am most comfortable with the idea of creativity as a multifarious beast, influenced by both personality and the cultural, social and professional environment in which engineers, in this case, find themselves. This being the case, engineering educators therefore have some opportunity to influence these factors, and hence the development of creative thinking in our students. I then examine a case study of a design project in second‐year chemical and environmental engineering in an attempt to ground these ideas about creativity in engineering education practice, and present the lessons learned from this experience.  相似文献   

14.
A project-based active/cooperative design course is planned, implemented, assessed and evaluated to achieve several desired engineering outcomes. The course allows freshman-level students to gain professional hands-on engineering design experience through an opportunity to practise teamwork, quality principles, communication skills, life-long learning, realistic constraints and awareness of current domestic and global challenges. Throughout successive design reports and in-class assignments, the students are required by the end of the semester to communicate, clearly and concisely, the details of their design both orally and in writing through a functional artefact/prototype, a design notebook, an A0 project poster and a final oral presentation. In addition to these direct assessment tools, several indirect measures are used to ensure triangulation. Assignments are based on customer expectations using a detailed checklist. This paper shows the direct and indirect assessment tools that indicated a high level of achievement of course learning outcomes and a high level of student satisfaction.  相似文献   

15.
This paper deals with a required methods course, based on the national curriculum of science and technology for junior high schools. The course participants are pre-service teachers who study towards a B.Sc. degree in education in science and technology parallel to their studies in one of the faculties of sciences or engineering. Working in small teams, the students carry out a project in a Project-Based Learning (PBL) environment. The final outcomes of the project are group and individual written reports, a portfolio, a multimedia presentation and a physical model. The research question was: what implementation issues and processes do higher education students encounter in a Project-Based Learning environment which involves an alternative assessment approach? Qualitative and quantitative tools for collecting data included ‘the participant as observer’ observations at the classroom, semi-structured interviews with students, questionnaire, and analysis of students' reports and products. The findings relate to the advantages of PBL from the students' point of view, the challenges students experienced and perceived while conducting their projects, and the benefits students may gain from formative assessment.  相似文献   

16.
It has often been suggested that actual or anticipated final grades may influence the ratings given by students in student experience surveys but few studies have been able to test this using actual grades. A study was carried out involving six courses over all four year levels of an undergraduate engineering programme, where students were asked to identify themselves in an experience survey by providing their student ID on the survey form. The aim of the study was to investigate a number of questions related to the readiness of students to identify themselves, and to examine any correlation between final examination grades, ratings of student satisfaction and the students’ perception of their level of understanding of material in their courses. Students were discovered to have a poor idea of how well they understand the concepts presented in their courses. This lack of an accurate idea of their own understanding is particularly important because ‘student understanding’ correlated to the ratings they gave to the course. Ratings were largely unaffected by final marks but students who gave their ID outperformed those who did not in end‐of‐year examinations. Higher year level students were more inclined to identify themselves and ratings tended to increase with year level.  相似文献   

17.
Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as professionals. This article describes the organisation and impact of a mini-conference and project work – the creation of a software product and its introduction in the market – aimed at the development of professional competencies in general and writing skills in particular. The course was evaluated by assessing the students’ perception of the development of a number of professional competencies through a questionnaire completed by 125 students from two consecutive year groups. The results indicate that the project work and the mini-conference had a positive impact on students’ perceptions of the development of professional competencies.  相似文献   

18.
Seven years of industrial experience followed by 30 years of academic research and teaching in structural engineering have led the author to believe that the prime objective of a university design course is not the design project itself but to train students to solve problems, as this will last them throughout their careers. It is shown how design projects can be formulated for the purpose of encouraging students to develop their problem-solving abilities. More importantly, a sequential assessment technique has been developed to quantify the students’ ability to both think and learn as well as the students’ grasp of the fundamental principles, all of which are required in problem-solving.  相似文献   

19.
嵌入式系统设计课程实践性很强,是培养学生工程能力的良好载体,但是当前该课程教学知识点零散、关联性弱,不利于学生整体理解及在工程中应用。以工程教育思想为指导,使用项目教学,调整知识点顺序,理论知识结合项目应用讲解,每次实验完成项目的部分功能,最后整合成整个项目,可使学生快速在整体上理清知识脉络。通过对比,改革后学生成绩90分以上人数比例提高5.9%~8.2%,80-90分人数比例提高23.0%~24.3%;学生课程设计的复杂度方面提高16.3~17.6分,完整度方面提高12.3~13.4分,期末成绩平均分提高8.7~9.6分,学生工程能力有了明显提高。  相似文献   

20.
对大学生工程能力的培养是高等工程教育的重要环节。结合CDIO工程教育理念,以房屋结构设计课程教学过程中注重培养学生的工程能力,提高学生创新能力为出发点,从改革课程体系、优化教学内容、改进教学方法、加强实践教学、重视教师工程能力的培养等方面探索了房屋结构设计课程建设的途径和方法。  相似文献   

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