Trust is an important aspect of learning. However, there is little published research on how students perceive its value. In this article, we report on engineering students' perceptions of the role of trust in their learning and their experiences of what teachers do in their courses that builds trust. Nine students participated in semi-structured…

This study aims to understand how students manage higher technical education and contribute to research on institutional culture, STEM education, and students' educational strategies by identifying patterns of how students navigate within one university's engineering education. To achieve this, we define and use the concept of technical science…

This work spotlights the experiences from ten years of implementing sustainable development in all educational programs at a technical university. With a focus on the critical issue of involving more academics in the work, experiences are shared through an ethnographic account including focus group interviews. 'Sustainable development' has been…

High dropout rates in the first year of undergraduate studies are an expression of the secondary-tertiary transition problem and they seem to be particularly high in those degree programs where specialized mathematics courses are taught in the first year of study. Research shows that students' difficulties during the transition period cannot be…

Classifications of higher education institutions into categories that are more or less clearly differentiated through prestige and status are legion in the world of higher education. The notion of parallel categories with comparable statuses, such as those of different types of universities, is however much less well understood. This paper…

Purpose: The information technology (IT) sector has been seen as central to society's transformation to a more just and sustainable society, which underlines teachers' responsibility to foster engineers who can contribute specifically to such ends. This study aims to report an effort to significantly update an existing engineering programme in IT…

Climate change increases the risk of natural disasters, which requires the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure. This implies a need to enable engineering students to deal with highly complex problems and uncertainty. These competencies refer to the concept of resilience, describing the ability of a system to adapt to threatening…

This article explores how female university students' abilities to present themselves as 'authentic' engineers are imbricated with discursive constructions of gender and gender equality. The empirical data comes from interviews and video diaries collected with three female engineering students. The analysis demonstrates the power of the Swedish…

As more entrepreneurial experiences are integrated into engineering programs, students are faced with new challenges they need help in managing. While previous research has identified entrepreneurial activities that engineering students struggle with, the antecedents of these difficulties have not been directly investigated. Drawing on an…

In this paper, we propose a method to analyse the coherence of existing curricula at higher education institution. We focus our attention to engineering programmes at universities but the proposed method is by no means restricted to those cases. In contrast to other known methods, our approach is quantitative, decentralised, and asynchronous and…

The common purpose of models is to provide simplified representations of other phenomena. Depending on type, they are suitable for communication, documentation, prognostication, problem solving, and more. Various types of models, such as drawings, mock-ups, flow charts, and mathematical formulae, are important tools in engineering work. An…

This paper provides some insights into the use of example-generating tasks in the design of a technology-rich learning environment to enhance students' mathematical thinking. The paper reports on an early stage of a design-based research project concerning the design of tasks and associated feedback utilising the affordances provided by a combined…

Purpose: Considering the relevance of education for sustainable development (SD) to enhancing engineers' abilities to contribute towards sustainability-related issues, this study aims to help understand the global context of the insertion of SD into engineering education and to provide guidelines to further evolve research and efforts towards…

The undeniable importance of reading in higher education prompted this investigation into the reading skills of a group often overlooked in previous research: master's level students studying in English-medium instruction (EMI) environments. Participants (148 master's-level students of engineering) completed the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Form G),…

Research has identified several aspects that influence students' transition to mathematics studies at university, but these aspects have often been studied separately. Our study contributes to the field's understanding of the transition between upper secondary and university mathematics by taking a multifaceted perspective not previously explored.…