This paper reports on narrative inquiry research conducted with nontraditional undergraduates as they pursued a common goal of becoming engineers. Participants were enrolled in a two-year engineering transfer program offered in the evenings, via synchronous broadcast distance instruction, by a public, land-grant university situated in the western…

System Dynamics is a required course offered to junior Mechanical Engineering students at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. It addresses the intercoupling dynamics of a wide range of dynamic systems: including mechanical, electrical, fluid, hydraulic, electromechanical, and biomedical systems. This course is challenging for students due to the…

The hybrid course format has gained popularity in the engineering education community over the past few years. Although studies have examined student outcomes and attitudes toward hybrid courses, a limited number of studies have examined how students interact with online videos in hybrid courses. This study examined the video-viewing behaviors of…

English is an access to a global society (Normark, 2013), which implies studying a specific subject area through English is crucial in today's educational arena. The reason behind this is that English is a motive for universities to gain a global status as Coleman (2006) argued. Thus, the focal point of this study is to reveal motivational…

Conventional graded assignments are commonly structured in a format where students attempt a prescribed question and are graded based on the completeness of their workings rather than the understanding of concepts. An alternative assignment format was proposed which requires students to identify and explain mistakes in a given set of workings…

The main challenges facing a project based learning (PBL) facilitator in our institution is addressed here in team forming for multidisciplinary PBL subjects of diploma students in mechanical and civil engineering. These challenges include the type of projects, how to team up students, how to proceed with planning, how to swap planning outputs…

Extensive literature on study abroad outcomes documents the benefits of study abroad for all undergraduate students, regardless of academic major. However, engineering majors, at 5% of all undergraduate students nationally who study abroad, are substantially less likely to study abroad than their social science peers, at 17.3% participation (IIE,…

An ongoing concern at institutions of higher education is persistence among underrepresented minority students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs. This qualitative exploratory case study was designed to investigate whether combining two strategies, orientations and gamification, to provide more supports for…

In the study herein aimed at incorporating the entrepreneurship mindset early on in the engineering curriculum of undergraduate students via a final project of an introductory programming course with MATLAB. Students were asked to find a need on campus, in the society, or in the market with a business potential and write a standalone application…

Social media platforms such as WhatsApp are increasingly used in formal education settings. However, there is little research to guide educators on how to set up effective peer tutoring groups on social media platforms, particularly between tutors and tutees who rarely meet face-to-face. In the context of a WhatsApp mathematics tutoring project,…

Engineering education must embrace several challenges, such as increased numbers of work-based students, increased demand for online education, mismatches in employability skills and industry requirements, and lack of student engagement. The hydrology course at the University of Southern Queensland attracts more than 100 students every year, where…

To make the transfer student pathway viable to meet workforce needs, it is essential to think beyond simply linking two institutions and getting students in the door--students need to be supported throughout the adjustment period. In this article, we address the "support" aspect of the problem by reporting findings from 306 engineering…

Contribution: There are many on-line resources available to learn about optics and photonics, but no assessment tools exist to evaluate the learning achievements. This paper presents an assessment framework whose validity has been proven on a course with over 70 engineering students. Background: There is evidence that on-line resources complement…

Recent reforms in education call for science teachers to incorporate STEM concepts into their curricula. This study explores the association among student and teacher demographics, and student learning of engineering content and attitudes towards STEM after participation in an elementary or middle school engineering-based science curricula.…

To support elementary school students in finding a solution to an engineering problem, the authors developed a series of five lessons using the 5E Instructional Model (Bybee 2014). The lessons align with the "Next Generation Science Standards" and the "Common Core State Standards" and integrate the teaching and learning of…