In the UK, the USA and Australia, there have been calls for an increase in the number of engineering graduates to meet the needs of current global challenges. Universities around the world have been grappling with how to both attract more engineering students and to then retain them. Attrition from engineering programmes is disturbingly high. This…

This paper reports on an investigation into the potential to widen participation to Higher Education provided by a flexible learning MEng Engineering. The MEng is part of an integrated programme that provides progression routes from a traditional day release Apprenticeship, through HNC, FdEng at a Further Education College to a flexible learning…

Engineering education is undergoing a restructuring driven by the needs of an increasingly multidisciplinary engineering profession. At the same time, power systems are transitioning toward future smart grids that will require power engineers with skills outside of the core power engineering domain. Since including new topics in the existing…

Our study addresses the need for new approaches to prepare novice elementary teachers to teach both science and engineering, and for new tools to measure how well those approaches are working. This in particular would inform the teacher educators of the extent to which novice teachers are developing expertise in facilitating their students'…

Mathematics in engineering education causes many thresholds in the courses because of the demand of abstract conceptualisation. Electronics depend heavily on more or less complex mathematics. Therefore the concepts of analogue electronics are hard to learn since a great deal of students struggle with the calculations and procedures needed. A…

Medical doctor and engineer are highly esteemed STEM professions. This study investigates academic and motivational characteristics of a sample of high school students in Thailand who aspire to become medical doctors or engineers. We used logistic regression to compare maths performance, gender typicality, gender contentedness, and maths and…

Attaining a professional engineering degree is a dream of many pre-engineering intermediate students in Pakistan. Several students face scarcity of resources to accomplish and enliven their dreams of getting admission into an engineering institute, which results in great hardships and turmoil for them. The literature reveals that quantitative work…

Computational thinking and creative thinking are valuable tools both within and outside of computer science (CS). The goal of the project discussed here is to increase students' achievement in CS courses through a series of computational creativity exercises (CCEs). In this paper, the framework of CCEs is described, and the results of two separate…

Mother tongue rhetoric transfer is unavoidable in ESL writings, especially for Iranian ESL learners, since Persian and English language is quite different. The paper discusses the negative transfer of mother tongue rhetoric in Iranian undergraduate ESL learners' writings from the perspectives of choosing rhetorical structure in English and Persian…

Using two case studies of children's knowledge, this paper sheds light on the value, diversity, and necessity of Indigenous and place-based knowledge to science and engineering curricula in rural areas. Rural contexts are rich environments for cultivating contextual knowledge, hence framing a critical pedagogy of teaching and learning. Indigenous…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between technology and engineering instruction and technology and engineering literacy in grades K-8. The factors identified and used for the purpose of this study were gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and important modes of technology and engineering instruction. These factors…

Research on academic literacy within higher education has focused almost exclusively on the development of academic literacy in English. This book is unique in showing how students use other languages when they engage with written academic content--whether in reading, discussing, or writing--and how increasingly multilingual higher education…

This interactional ethnographic study addresses an emerging problem in higher education: the lack of research tracing the developing processes and principles for instructional design in global education programs. Curriculum design in higher education is often situated within a particular course within a discipline within an ongoing program.…

While the changing nature of design activity is a topic supported by a range of popular and academic publications, the role that design tools have taken in that change is less well studied. The tools used in the trade, both by industrial designers and mechanical engineers, have undergone a rapid transformation in the last fifty years. The research…

This paper examines shifts in the knowledge production policy agenda at Japanese research universities -- a transition from discipline-based academic tradition towards interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production -- through a case study of a leading interdisciplinary research institute. We examine this transition through the case of Tohoku…