Background: Given the disparities in gender representation, efforts are needed to make engineering education more inclusive and attractive to young people. It is important that those entering engineering education are making this decision with sufficient understanding of what it means to be an engineer. This study explored how lower secondary…

This study investigates Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish first-year engineering students' task performance in mathematics and examines how it relates to their motivational values and beliefs about the nature of mathematics. In a set of seven mathematical tasks, female students outperformed male students, for example, in the simplification of…

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global disruption to higher education, especially in engineering education, where many teaching and learning activities are difficult or impossible to conduct online. This study examines the changes in the students' experiences of this disruption using a 26-item process-oriented course experience questionnaire (CEQ)…

One of the many varieties of university-industry collaboration is industry engagement in doctoral programmes. A scheme operated by the Development Fund of the Swedish Construction Industry since the early 1990s has supported thesis projects for about 150 PhD candidates. While they were doctoral students they were employed by contractors as…

This study focuses on female and male students who succeed in engineering programmes in Sweden, and why they have success. Data were collected through a questionnaire sent to all engineering students in Sweden registered for their seventh semester during year 2012 and about 30% of the students in the cohort responded on several questions. The…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a programme that is attached to difficult courses with the objective of increasing student performance and retention. However, an SI programme also has the potential to increase overall student performance and retention during the first critical year if applied to introductory courses. In this study the latter…

The phenomenon of women's underrepresentation in engineering is well known. However, the slow progress in achieving better gender equality here compared with other domains has accentuated the "numbers" issue, while the quality aspects have been largely ignored. This study aims to shed light on both these aspects via the lens of mentors,…

Students' ratings of teaching quality on course units in a computer science program and an environmental engineering program at a large Swedish university were obtained using the Course Experience Questionnaire; 8888 sets of ratings were obtained from men and 4280 sets were obtained from women over ten academic years. These student ratings from…

Engineers face challenges when they are to manage project groups and be leaders for organisations because such positions demand skills in social competence and empathy. Previous studies have shown that engineers have low degrees of social competence skills. In this study, the level of empathy as measured by the four subscales of the Interpersonal…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) can be an efficient way of improving student success in difficult courses. Here, a study is made on SI attached to difficult first-year engineering courses. The results show that both the percentage of students passing a difficult first-year engineering course, and scores on the course exams are considerably higher…