Browsing by Subject "engineering education"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Conceptions of mathematics and student identity: implications for engineering education
    (Taylor & Francis, 2013) Craig, Tracy S
    Lecturers of first-year mathematics often have reason to believe that students enter university studies with naive conceptions of mathematics and that more mature conceptions need to be developed in the classroom. Students' conceptions of the nature and role of mathematics in current and future studies as well as future career are pedagogically important as they can impact on student learning and have the potential to influence how and what we teach. As part of ongoing longitudinal research into the experience of a cohort of students registered at the author's institution, students' conceptions of mathematics were determined using a coding scheme developed elsewhere. In this article, I discuss how the cohort of students choosing to study engineering exhibits a view of mathematics as conceptual skill and as problem-solving, coherent with an accurate understanding of the role of mathematics in engineering. Parallel investigation shows, however, that the students do not embody designated identities as engineers.
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    Contradictions in the situational logic of the university: implications for student success
    (2014) Kotta, Linda; Case, Jenni; Luckett, Kathy
    Nearly sixteen years into the new democracy, student success at South African universities continues to be differentiated along lines of race. The tendency has been to define the problem in terms of student deficit. This article suggests that this is a limited view of a complex problem. The study investigates the case of a South African universitys engineering department and its historical struggle with the success of black students. It is an exploration of students progression through a design course and the associated pedagogical realities. Using a social realist approach, this study shows that the higher education environment is a complex of necessary contradictions which create a situational logic for agents. In the process of navigating the inconsistencies of a system in which academic development and quality assurance work against each other, it seems that black students get caught in the middle, with deleterious consequences for the countrys transformative agenda.
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    A curriculum framework for flexible engineering degrees in South Africa
    (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (Scotland), 2014-09-23) Grayson, Diane; Collier-Reed, Brandon I; Pearce, Howard; Shay, Suellen
    South Africa produces too few engineers to meet its development needs. The number of graduating engineers is slowly increasing, but is still only about 2000 per year, serving a population of over 50 million. Data from the Council on Higher Education (CHE 2013) show that for the 2005 cohort of BEng students nationally only 25% obtained an engineering degree in the regulation time of four years, with another 19% taking five years. In a study for the Engineering Council of South Africa on improving throughput (Fisher 2011), one suggestion was to increase curriculum flexibility to better cater for the needs of a diverse student population. As part of a CHE project, we developed exemplar curricula for engineering degrees designed to take either four or five years to complete. In this paper we describe the underpinning principles that guided the design and illustrate how they are applied in curriculum exemplars for a mechanical engineering degree.
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    The development and validation of an instrument — the Technological Profile Inventory — to determine students’ levels of technological literacy in South Africa
    (International Association of Technology, Education and Development, 2014-09-23) Luckay, Melanie B; Collier-Reed, Brandon I
    In this article we describe the development and validation of an instrument – the technological profile inventory (TPI). The instrument can be used to determine students’ level of technological literacy. The items used in the TPI were drawn from a previous study (Collier-Reed, 2006) and were based on a rigorous qualitative analysis of interview data which was in turn informed by categories that emerged from a phenomenographic analysis. Data were collected from four groups of students, three groups of first year students at university Engineering (167), Commerce (65), Arts (218), and one group of high school students (179). The students’ responses to the TPI were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach alpha testing, as well as a one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The result of the analysis was a modified version of the TPI where the data were found to be reliable and valid. The significant factors that defined the ‘nature of technology’ were found to be the view of technology as either an Artefact or related to a Process, while those constituting ‘interaction with technological artefacts’ were Direction/Instruction and Tinkering. A cohort analysis suggests Engineering students are statistically more likely to view technology as a process and interact with technological artefacts with less fear and more likely through self-initiation (Tinkering) – a more advanced technologically literate position. On the other hand the Arts students are more likely to expect direction or instruction from an authority figure (Direction/Instruction) when interacting with a technological artefact - a less technologically literate position. Further work involves determining how to meaningfully combine the scores achieved by an individual completing the TPI to ultimately determine a score indicative of their applicable level of technological literacy.
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    Enabling Capabilities in an Engineering Extended Curriculum Programme
    (Bloomsbury Press, 2017-09) Craig, Tracy S; Bangeni, Bongi; Kapp, Rochelle
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    Integrating multidisciplinary engineering knowledge
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Wolff, Karin; Luckett, Kathy
    In order to design two distinct engineering qualification levels for an existing University of Technology programme, empirical evidence based on the current diploma is necessary to illuminate the nature of and the relationship between the contextual and conceptual elements underpinning a multidisciplinary engineering curriculum. The increasing focus on contextual application could result in decreasing opportunities to develop the conceptual disciplinary grasp required for a dynamic, emerging region at the forefront of technological innovation. Using the theoretical tools of Bernstein and Maton to analyse final year student practice, the research addresses the question of how multidisciplinary knowledge is integrated by students, and what this reveals about the nature of such knowledge. The paper presents a conceptualisation of multidisciplinary knowledge integration practices as a dynamic process along two axes simultaneously, shifting between different forms and levels of conceptual and contextual knowledge.
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    Learning as acquiring a discursive identity through participation in a community: improving student learning in engineering education
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Allie, Saalih; Armien, Mogamat Noor; Burgoyne, Nicolette; Case, Jennifer M; Collier-Reed, Brandon I; Craig, Tracy S; Deacon, Andrew; Fraser, Duncan M; Geyer, Zulpha; Jacobs, Cecilia; Jawitz, Jeff; Kloot, Bruce; Kotta, Linda; Langdon, Genev
    In this paper, we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering, we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice.
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    Observations and Conclusions of Dynamics Students’ Mathematical Fluency
    (South African Society for Engineering Education, 2015-07-29) Craig, Tracy S; Cloete, Trevor J
    The course Dynamics I in mechanical engineering is a challenging course for many reasons, one of them being its mathematical demands. A collaboration between the first author (a mathematics lecturer and mathematics education researcher) and the second author (a mechanical engineer and the Dynamics I lecturer) sought to answer the question “What specific and identifiable mathematical difficulties are experienced by the Dynamics I students?” The observational results of this, in essence, ethnographic case study suggest that there are two levels of mathematical challenge, namely specific symbolic and computational difficulties as well as the need for well-developed problem-solving processes. We discuss our observations and provide pedagogic advice for lecturers of mathematics to help ease the transition to Dynamics I.
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    Quantitative literacy practices in civil engineering study: designs for teaching and learning
    (Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2016) Prince, Robert; Simpson, Zach
    Higher education needs to produce increasing numbers of good quality graduates. Included herein is the need for graduates that can engage in high level quantitative literacy practices, which requires designs for learning that understand how texts are constructed through language, images and mathematical notation, which together form the meaning-making repertoire of quantitative literacy. This paper applies a framework for quantitative literacy events in the analysis of a particular graphical procedure used during undergraduate civil engineering courses throughout South Africa. The framework draws on the New Literacies Studies’ view of literacy as social practice and examines the specific practices that students need to engage with during individual quantitative literacy events. Application of the framework demonstrates that such graphical procedures constitute quantitative literacy events in which students engage in various quantitative practices, the implications of which inform designs for learning in civil engineering in several key respects.