First year is a delicate time for students. Many have little idea what to expect of university, and their sense of identity as tertiary students is fragile. A diagnostic assessment early in first semester may reassure students that they have chosen the right path. However, some academics, particularly in engineering, argue that this early…

The study gives an account of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) within the engineering field, students' willingness to learn professional English vocabulary, and ESP issues related to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The study investigates students' need to learn English through data analyzed in a descriptive and exploratory study, focusing…

MATLAB live scripts are useful for reproducible programmatic compilation of chemical data and literature. In this article, we use a combination of the PubChem PUG REST Application Programming Interface (API), Structured Data Query (SDQ) agent, and text extraction with MATLAB live scripts that allow programmatic PubChem similarity searching, SMARTS…

GitHub is increasingly finding a role in academia to both encourage reproducible computational research and to foster a collaborative environment. We show that employing GitHub as an implementation of version control in engineering-related fields reinforces the 'design-build-evaluate' way of thinking and prepares students with skills they can use…

Undergraduate research has been shown to provide numerous benefits to students. In recent years an effort to scale the experience has led to development of course-based undergraduate research that often focuses on data collection or analysis. This article describes the design of a mentoring course-based undergraduate research experience (M-CURE)…

This resent study investigated the relationships between leisure attitude, self-efficacy and achievement motivation among first year university students. Furthermore, this study examined the mediating role of self-efficacy on the relationship between leisure attitude and achievement motivation among university students. A total of 190 students…

Several major reform areas attempted by 'New Engineering Education' (NEE), China's most recent engineering education reform initiative at university level, are examined for their direct and indirect impact on Chinese STEM-major students' satisfaction with their programs in this study. With data collected from a sample of 619 Chinese undergraduate…

A diverse body of feminist scholarship has addressed the masculine orientation of Western engineering education for at least four decades. Among critiques specifically targeting curriculum, a recurrent line of argumentation highlights its reductionist framing and narrow focus on mathematics and technology. The argument is that these traits…

Educators in the twenty-first century need to think of innovative ways to engage and prepare students for current and future challenges while cultivating an interest among students in STEM disciplines. This study sought to investigate the impact of problem-based learning on students' content knowledge and critical thinking towards STEM. This study…

Teaching STEM concepts to today's high school students has been challenging. Span of attention is short. Students are glued to their electronic devices. They cannot appreciate the abstract method of teaching, meaning covering concepts followed by solving problems from a textbook. Research has shown that students become excited and motivated to…

Although the relationship between creativity and ADHD is uncertain, recent studies examining how dimensionally assessed characteristics of ADHD relate to creativity and divergent thinking in adults suggest an occasional positive, linear relationship between the constructs. However, the executive functions proposed to underlie characteristics of…

This research focused on first-year university students' visuospatial cognition in terms of producing three-dimensional (3D) representations of objects from two-dimensional (2D) views. The research was important since students often had difficulty with 2D to 3D transition activities. A synthesis from the literature established a 2D to 3D…

On-demand video has become a seamless part of the fabric of information consumption. Initially inspired by the popularity of video guides for practical skills such as cooking and DIY, instructional videos were developed for equipment used in the first-year chemical engineering undergraduate teaching laboratory at Imperial College London. During…

This paper presents 'expert opinions' on what should be taught in a first-year linear algebra course at university; the aim is to gain a generic picture and general guiding principles for such a course. Drawing on a Delphi method, 14 university professors--called 'experts' in this study--addressed the following questions: What should be on a…

Many industrial arts, technology education, and now technology and engineering education leaders have made their mark on the technology and engineering teaching profession. Their legacy is something that members of the profession enjoy and have a responsibility to continue and build upon. This is the sixteenth in a series of articles entitled…