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…

This article proposes an alternative (or additional) place for the use of robotics within the secondary school curriculum. Robotics provides a unique opportunity to engage students in genuinely multidisciplinary learning that challenges their misperceptions about the nature of science/technology and engages them with 'big questions'. After…

We report on a study conceived with the idea that the use of logic in regard to mathematical reasoning as it actually occurs in practice is not limited to its prominent role in formal deductions and proofs. Interpretation of different mathematical situations elicits in fact the use of mostly unconscious forms of reasoning, close to those of…

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,…

The expectations for engineers to solve complex, global issues are growing at rates that exceed current curricula in engineering education. Studies show that early career engineering students are not confident in their ability to innovate. In this paper, the authors investigated the innovation self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., questioning, observing,…

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…

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…