Worked examples can help novice learners develop early schemata from an expert's solution to a problem. Nonetheless, the worked examples themselves are no guarantee that students will explore these experts' solutions effectively. This study explores two different approaches to supporting engineering technology students' learning in an…

This study implements a design-based research approach to design and evaluate different scaffolding strategies for supporting student learning as well as promoting student agency within a computational science course. The course introduces computational methods and tools in the context of disciplinary problems for materials science and engineering…

Background: Modeling and simulation practices have become commonplace in modern engineering, but in-depth research on the development of modeling and simulation expertise is needed to identify the learning processes involved in successfully acquiring these skills. Purpose: This study investigated student dimensions of expertise when engaged in…

Experimentation is one of the important strategies used in engineering design to understand the relationship between relevant variables so that they can be manipulated to generate optimized solution for a particular problem or design. The understanding of students' experimentation strategies allows educators to help students improve their design…

Modeling is an important element of discovery and design processes because it can help individuals to comprehend and facilitate solutions to problems, mediate among mental and external representations, and off-load cognitive demands. However, engaging in model generation, comprehension, and transformation requires the orchestration of domain…

Reflective practice is becoming a more necessary skill across all disciplines and industry sectors. This study describes the reflective processes capstone engineering students engaged with as part of modelling-based learning assignments over the entire course of a semester. Students answered multiple reflection questions asking them about…

In science and engineering education, the use of heuristics has been introduced as a way of understanding the world, and as a way to approach problem-solving and design. However, important consequences for the use of heuristics are that they do not always guarantee a correct solution. Learning by Design has been identified as a pedagogical…

Contribution: Knowledge of students' Habits of Mind in a signal processing course, and a method for education research. The method identifies factors that may influence students' performance, but are not evident when analyzing agglomerated data; it is an alternative to the traditional case study method as it derives the cases after applying a…

Contribution: This paper adds to existing literature on teaching basic concepts of electricity using computer-based instruction; findings suggest that students can develop an accurate understanding of electric circuits when they generate multiple and complementary representations that build toward computational models. Background: Several studies…

In this article, we explore how information, communications, and computational technology, or computer technology for short, influences the way that engineering is taught and learned. The goal of our analysis it to contribute towards a research, adoption, and policy agenda for propagating the effective use of computer technology in engineering…

Engineering design thinking is hard to teach and still harder to learn by novices primarily due to the undetermined nature of engineering problems that often results in multiple solutions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of teaching engineering design thinking to freshmen students by using a computer-aided Design (CAD) simulation…

This multiple case study focused on the implementation of a computer-aided design (CAD) simulation to help students engage in engineering design to learn science concepts. Our findings describe three case studies that adopted the same learning design and adapted it to three different populations, settings, and classroom contexts: at the…

This article presents two case studies aimed at exploring the use of self-explanations in the context of computational science and engineering (CSE) education. The self-explanations were elicited as students' in-code comments of a set of worked-examples, and the cases involved two different approaches to CSE education: glass box and black box. The…

This paper studies electrical engineering learners' preferences for learning methods with various degrees of activity. Less active learning methods such as homework and peer reviews are investigated, as well as a newly introduced very active (constructive) learning method called "slectures," and some others. The results suggest that…

This article investigates the effectiveness of a course employing a discipline-based computing approach. The research questions driving this study were: (1) Can experiences with discipline-based computing promote students' acquisition and application of foundational computing concepts and procedures? (2) How do students perceive and experience the…