The High School Summer Research Program (HSSRP) is a rigorous eight-week research experience that challenges high school students to a novel scientific question in an engineering laboratory at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The program collates highly…

Background: Students' beliefs about knowledge (epistemic beliefs) and their motivations toward processing information (epistemic motivation) have been suggested as influencing aspects of learning. Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between engineering students' approach to solving an open-ended homework problem and their epistemic…

Background: Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play critical roles in undergraduate education. Past studies have examined various programs developed for GTAs, but little work exists that examines GTAs' personal experiences and perceptions in engineering education. To develop teaching environments and training programs that foster positive…

The Russian and international legislation ensure equal educational rights to all people regardless of whether have a disability or not. However, traditional approaches to organization of educational activities often do not provide a high enough level of education (including higher education) for people with disabilities as they do not take into…

University courses concerning Computer Vision and Image Processing are generally taught using a traditional methodology that is focused on the teacher rather than on the students. This approach is consequently not effective when teachers seek to attain cognitive objectives involving their students' critical thinking. This manuscript covers the…

Science, engineering, and mathematics are fields that many students see as separate entities. But if these fields are combined with technology, they become STEM. This investigation provides a context and allows students to explore mathematics, science, and engineering within that context. It requires students to model with mathematics and find…

With the widespread adoption of the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013), science teachers now aspire to integrate engineering into science instruction, as the standards suggest, yet many do not know how. The first steps are to define engineering and identify tasks that incorporate engineering, which can be…

The purpose of this work is to contribute to the debate on the best pedagogical approach to developing undergraduate mechanical engineering skills to meet the requirements of contemporary complex working environments. The paper provides an example of using student-entrepreneur collaboration in the teaching of modules to Mechanical Engineering…

In this work, an industry-based and team-oriented education model was established based on a traditional mechanical engineering (ME) senior design class in order to better prepare future engineers and leaders so as to meet the increasing demand for high-quality engineering graduates. In the renovated curriculum, industry-sponsored projects became…

Generation Z is gaining popularity as the name used to refer to those born beginning in the mid to late 1990s. This is the generation that follows the Millennials, and they are just starting to arrive on college campuses. Much attention has been paid to Millennials and their impact on society, and because of this Generation Z members are often…

The sheet resistance of a conducting material of uniform thickness is analogous to the resistivity of a solid material and provides a measure of electrical resistance. In 1958, L. J. van der Pauw found an effective method for computing sheet resistance that requires taking two electrical measurements from four points on the edge of a simply…

An informational brochure was created to assist students and faculty unfamiliar with the industrial-organizational (IO) and human factors (HF) disciplines. The brochure highlights the content of these two professions, presents advice for undergraduates to prepare for admission to IO and HF graduate programs, provides sources of IO and HF…

Previous studies have examined the online research behaviors of graduate students in terms of how they seek and retrieve research-related information on the Web across diverse disciplines. However, few have focused on graduate students' searching activities, and particularly for their research tasks. Drawing on Kuiper, Volman, and Terwel's (2008)…

This review brings together the literature that pertains to the role of relational reasoning, or the ability to discern meaningful patterns within any stream of information, in the mental work of scientists, medical doctors, and engineers. Existing studies that measure four forms of relational reasoning--analogy, anomaly, antinomy, and…

MIC-O-MAP (MICroscopic-Observations-Macroscopic-Predictions) is a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environment designed for developing micro-macro thinking skills among science and engineering undergraduate students. Micro-macro thinking involves being able to analyze dynamic processes and interactions on a microscopic level and establish…