Engineering education

About: Engineering education is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 24293 publications have been published within this topic receiving 234621 citations.

Systems, systems of systems, and the education of engineers

Abstract: The thesis presented here is that the result of engineering is the design, construction, or operation of systems or their subsystems and components and that the teaching of systems must be central to engineering education. It is maintained that current undergraduate engineering curricula do not give the student adequate appreciation of this major intellectual element of their profession. Five proposals for approaches to correct this deficiency are offered: opportunities for clinical practice throughout all the undergraduate years; the use of distributed interactive simulation technology in semester-long projects; courses or course material on the phenomenology and behavior of systems; use of project management tools in engineering clinics; and encouraging engineering faculty to spend some part of their sabbaticals engaged in system design or operation. Issues of implementation are addressed, including the scaling of these ideas to universities that must meet the needs of large numbers of students.

Engineering Students' Intelligence Beliefs and Learning

Abstract: Background Students' beliefs about their intellectual ability influence their use of learning strategies, learning effort, and response to failure or setbacks. Students with incremental views of intelligence believe that learning is possible with sufficient effort, whereas those with entity views believe that intelligence is a fixed quality and expenditure of effort reflects an insufficient amount of that quality. Purpose This study examined the relationship between engineering students' beliefs about intelligence and their perceived use of active learning strategies such as collaboration and knowledge-building behaviors, self-efficacy for learning and performance, and course grade. The study also examined the extent of entity and incremental beliefs in a sample of engineering students. Design/Method The correlational study analyzed data from 377 engineering students recruited from required engineering courses at a large public university. We used bivariate correlations to examine relationships between study variables and multiple regression analyses to examine predictive ability of the variables on learning strategies and course grade. Results Our results showed that students' intelligence beliefs were correlated with active learning strategies. Self-efficacy, reported use of collaboration, and incremental beliefs about intelligence were predictive of students' reported use of knowledge-building behaviors. Intelligence beliefs were not predictive of course grade. Conclusions Our results demonstrate the utility of these motivational beliefs for understanding university engineering students' learning efforts. Our results also suggest a need for instructors to support incremental views of intelligence among engineering students.

Developing Knowledge Landscapes through Project-Based Learning

Abstract: The traditional civil engineering-based approach to construction engineering and management education focuses significant attention on core subjects such as scheduling, estimating, and contracts. This paper introduces an alternative approach to this education based on the concepts of project-based learning. Through the introduction of courses developed by the writers, the paper provides a foundation for changing current education approaches from a lecture-based format to a project-based format. In this format, students are challenged with open-ended problems requiring greater application of multiple engineering concepts as well as requiring interaction with outside experts from within the construction industry and related professions. An outline for a project-based learning course is presented with experiences and lessons learned from four implementations of the course. Student responses are presented to indicate the potential benefits of such an approach. This finding is further supported by the introduction of the Knowledge Landscape concept for construction education that emphasizes greater use of context, scope, and multiple intelligences in construction engineering education.