Purpose: This study aims to evaluate student motivation before and after the summer internship, in other words, to evaluate whether the summer internship affects male and female motivations differently. Design/methodology/approach: Investigating whether the motivation score predicts grade point average was included by adopting a quantitative…

Background: Although most engineering colleges offer a variety of co-curricular and extracurricular activities to enrich students' sense of belonging to the college, existing literature has not fully captured whether and how the various activities serve to support students' sense of belonging and predict student outcomes. Purpose: We investigated…

Copious research on Social Cognitive Career Theory has found student self-efficacy substantially related to persistence in engineering programs. The present exploratory study investigated the associations among faculty encouragement (a specific type of verbal persuasion in college context) and students' self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and…

This study explored changes in English language proficiency and several non-linguistic factors during four years of English medium instruction (EMI) in two academic disciplines in a Turkish university setting. Moreover, it also investigated whether changes (if any) had a predictive impact on the academic success of EMI students. In addition,…

Background: Mindsets are based on two basic assumptions: some people think that their intellectual abilities can be developed through hard work and instruction (i.e., a growth mindset), whereas others believe that nothing can change their level of intellectual ability (i.e., a fixed mindset). The association between mindsets and academic…

English medium instruction (EMI) in university-level engineering programmes is becoming the norm globally as well as in Turkey due to the internationalisation and job opportunities in this field. However, research about the job prospects among the engineering graduates who studied in EMI programmes are quite limited compared to the presence and…

As education seeks to mold itself to fit the demands of the 21st century, STEM education will continue to be an important consideration. The integrated and crosscutting nature of STEM is incorporated into the "Next Generation Science Standards" in which engineering design is raised to the same level as scientific inquiry and is expected…

The study deals with the roles and interrelations of the meaning-based assessments of dwellings, pathways and metaphors in design performance. It is grounded in the Meaning Theory [Kreitler, S., and H. Kreitler. 1990. "The Cognitive Foundations of Personality Traits." New York: Plenum], which enables identifying the cognitive contents…

Thermodynamics is a fundamental foundation of all engineering disciplines. A vast majority of engineering undergraduate programmes contain one or more courses on thermodynamics, and many engineers use thermodynamics every day to analyse or design energy systems. However, there is extensive anecdotal evidence as well as a wide range of published…

Higher education is attracting more participation from an increasingly diverse student body. This diversity invites concerns on effective instructional delivery as the extent of students' engagement in learning now varies widely. Anecdotes on students' "undesirable" dispositions in course participation are not uncommon in higher…

This study, undertaken at the Walter Sisulu University of Technology (WSU) in South Africa, describes how problem-based learning (PBL) affects the first year 'analog electronics course', when PBL and the lecturing mode is compared. Problems were designed to match real-life situations. Data between the experimental group and the control group that…

This study examines the relationship between students' evaluation of teaching effectiveness and the instructor's characteristics, based upon an original data set from an Italian university. Age and seniority (academic rank) are both found to affect negatively teaching evaluation, although the effect of rank depends heavily on the discipline.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the factors related to self-efficacy for Java programming among first year engineering students. An instrument assessing Java programming self-efficacy was developed from the computer programming self-efficacy scale of Ramalingam & Wiedenbeck. The instrument was administered at the beginning of the…

Predictive models of persistence and success in baccalaureate engineering programs were developed by analyzing five intellective and nine nonintellective variables. The 1984 entering freshman class in the College of Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University was studied. Usable data were obtained from 1,044 students, or 65% of the…

The Women's Experiences in College Engineering (WECE) project is the first cross-institutional, longitudinal examination of undergraduate women's experiences and persistence in engineering majors. The study was funded by both the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and conducted by Goodman Research Group, Inc. (GRG), a…