A comprehensive experiment for third-year undergraduate students in pharmaceutical engineering is described. Students had previously completed courses in analytical chemistry, chemistry of natural products, and bioseparation engineering and had background knowledge in purification, quantitative analysis, packed column chromatography,…

Background: Recent engineering education research has found improved learning outcomes when instructors engage students actively (e.g., through practice problems) rather than passively (e.g., in lectures). As more instructors shift toward active learning, research needs to identify how different types of activities affect students' cognitive…

Feature engineering, the construction of contextual and relevant features from system log data, is a crucial component of developing robust and interpretable models in educational data mining contexts. The practice of feature engineering depends on domain experts and system developers working in tandem in order to creatively identify actions and…

Engineering students are expected to develop professional skills in addition to their technical knowledge as outcomes of accredited engineering programs. Among the most critical professional skills is the ability to work effectively in a team. Working effectively in teams has learning benefits and also provides an environment for developing other…

This thesis is an article-based (3-paper format) dissertation. In the first article, the research team adapted an input-process-outcome (IPO) model of group-level processes in the classroom, as a theoretical framework, to examine students' experiences regarding pre-college engineering curricula, classroom environments, and their experiences with…

This dissertation is composed of three interlinked studies that pilot new methods for combining corpus linguistics and semantic network analysis (SNA) to understand and teach academic language. Findings indicate that this approach leads to a deeper understanding of technical writing and offers an exciting new avenue for writing curriculum. The…

Prior literature in engineering education has focused on student-centered learning by utilizing active, constructive, and interactive instructional strategies. However, most research focused on evaluating the effectiveness of these instructional strategies by comparing them with traditional approaches, which typically placed students in passive…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) provide significant STEM degrees to African Americans. Initiatives toward increasing diversity in STEM fields have been implemented by government and industry leaders. HBCUs annually award over 20% of all African American baccalaureate chemical engineering degrees. This speaks volume to the…

The national efforts underway to include engineering in K-12 science education present a variety of new challenges, including how to prepare teachers to teach a new discipline. In this paper, we focus on elementary teachers and how they enter into "responsive teaching," in which they closely attend and meaningfully respond to students'…

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…

Background: As engineers solve problems that are ill-structured and require collaboration, a common goal of engineering programs is to develop students' competencies for solving such problems in teams, often using cornerstone design experiences. Purpose: With the goal of designing effective learning environments, this study identifies…

Background: Prior to undertaking studies involving human subjects, engineering education researchers are required to consider the ethical implications of their work by obtaining approval from an ethical review board. Purpose/Hypothesis: Recent research suggests that some unintended consequences of this procedure are that it externalizes and…

Moulier Boutang's book "Cognitive Capitalism" introduces a radically different conception of the key resources -- 'immaterial labour' and 'capture of externalities' -- for economic activity, compared with the argument in the knowledge economy discourse that professionals manipulate 'symbols'. The paper explores this claim by firstly,…

In this quantitative study, we investigate the relationship between the conceptions of first-year Engineering Education students about the role of mathematics in their studies and career, as well as the links of their conceptions with their approaches to study. The data analysis revealed that the students view mathematics as being about…

Assessing language learners' needs has been abundantly studied by a large number of researchers interested in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Needs Analysis (NA). However, task-based language needs of the students of marine (maritime) engineering have not been well-investigated, to the date. A qualitative research method was used. We…