scholarly journals Adaptive Learning Implementation – A Cognitive Description Experiment for First Year Engineering Students at a Distance Education University

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
Ngaka Mosia
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Learning ◽  
Intervention Program ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Pass Rate ◽  
First Year ◽  
Pass Rates ◽  
Struggling Learners ◽  
Engineering Statistics ◽  
Differentiated Learning ◽  
High Level

A study was performed on a first year industrial engineering statistics course to improve the statistics pass rate. Statistics is a requisite for other engineering courses. The pass rate for the statistic course was below 50%. The primary purpose is to enable learners to build a capacity to comprehend module content and establish a deeper level of learning that will enable learners to achieve goals and objectives of TL lessons. An intervention program was instructionally designed to develop a personalized and differentiated learning process that breaks down lessons into lower and basic components, for struggling learners, and improves lessons to a complex high level and challenging activities for excelling students. Forty students were considered for the study. Moore’s theory of transactional distance was used as a theoretical framework. The data consisted of exam and assignment scores. A quantitative method was used to analyse the data. Hypothesis testing suggests that the intervention program is significant. The overall pass rates improved by 25%.

scholarly journals Developing an Innovative Program for First Year Engineering Statistics Students at an Open Distance University

2020 ◽  
pp. 407-415
Author(s):  
Richard Naidoo ◽  
Mosia Ngaka
Keyword(s):  
Intervention Program ◽  
Pass Rate ◽  
First Year ◽  
Pass Rates ◽  
Struggling Learners ◽  
Cognitive Components ◽  
Engineering Statistics ◽  
E Learning ◽  
Differentiated Learning ◽  
Level Of Significance

A study was performed on a first year industrial engineering statistics course to improve the statistics pass rate. Statistics is a requisite for other engineering courses. The pass rate for the statistic course was below 50%. The primary purpose is to enable learners to build a capacity to comprehend module content and establish a deeper level of learning that will enable learners to achieve goals and objectives of TL lessons. An intervention program was instructionally designed to develop a personalized and differentiated learning process that breaks down lessons into lower and basic cognitive components, for struggling learners. The program improves e‑learning lessons to a complex higher cognitive level and advances challenging activities for excelling students. Forty students were considered for the study. Moore’s theory of transactional distance was used as a theoretical framework. A quantitative method was used to analyse the data. The data consisted of assignment scores. Hypothesis testing at a 95% level of significance suggests that the intervention program made an impact. The overall pass rates improved by 25%.

scholarly journals The relationship between demographics and the academic achievement of engineering students

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolaas Johannes Luwes ◽  
James Swart
Keyword(s):  
Academic Achievement ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Pass Rate ◽  
Pass Rates ◽  
Older Students ◽  
Final Grade ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Design Projects ◽  
The Relationship

The changing structure of student populations or cohorts over decades’ produces changing academic achievements or results. This may be due to a number of factors, including the school education system, the political system and the sociocultural system. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between student demographics and the academic achievement of undergraduate engineering students over a 15-year period. A longitudinal descriptive study is used to determine the relationships between specific variables that existed between 1998 and 2013. These variables include gender, age and home languages of students that are contrasted to their final grade in a compulsory Design Projects module. Students need to obtain more than 50% to successfully complete this module, with the results indicating greater success for students with an Afrikaans or IsiZulu mother tongue than compared to students with a Sesotho, Setswana or Xhosa mother tongue. Younger students, less than 21 years of age, have a higher pass rate than older students who are more than 24 years of age. Finally, males outnumber females by more than 3:1. However, their final overall pass rates differ by only 3%, suggesting that both genders performed equally well in the Design Projects module. A key recommendation is to provide additional academic support to older students who may be struggling to synthesize knowledge and skills from a wide number of modules

Online self-assessments need to be regular and reflective to foster student engagement and success

2021 ◽  
pp. 002072092199767
Author(s):  
Arthur J Swart ◽  
Lawrence Meda
Keyword(s):  
Academic Success ◽  
Student Engagement ◽  
Student Learning ◽  
Reflective Practice ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Pass Rate ◽  
First Year ◽  
Course Content ◽  
Self Assessments

Assessment plays a major role in student learning. It needs to be provided on a regular basis and include the aspect of reflective practice to be really effective. The purpose of this article is to highlight the results of how an academic in Electrical Engineering effectively used Blackboard™ to foster student engagement and academic success through regular online self-assessments that require reflective practice. A time-lag study is used with a non-experimental descriptive design. A total of 812 first-year engineering students were asked to complete weekly online self-assessments via Blackboard™ between 2016 and 2018. Results indicate that students engaged at least three times more with each section of the course content and that their pass rate increased by more than 20% when compared to previous years where no online self-assessments were used. These results tend to suggest that online self-assessments should include multiple attempts with some form of feedback to foster student engagement and academic success.

Combining Adaptive and Cooperative Learning Strategies to Deal With Heterogeneity in Large Groups

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Luis Fernández-GutiérrezdelÁlamo ◽  
Luis F. Mazadiego ◽  
David Bolonio ◽  
Fernando Barrio-Parra ◽  
Miguel Izquierdo-Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Adaptive Learning ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Added Value ◽  
First Year ◽  
Group Lessons ◽  
Group Members ◽  
High Level ◽  
Large Groups

In undergraduate university degrees, students start their first year with a high level of heterogeneity in terms of acquired curricular competences. Therefore, the teaching given in these courses must face the challenge of turning this heterogeneity, in principle counterproductive, into an added value that helps students to face the subjects with expectations of success. Consequently, an innovative approach in the teaching of the first degree courses is needed, moving towards adaptive and personalized learning based on the use of new technologies, facilitating the overcoming of learned competences regardless of the starting level of the student. Other works focus on adaptive learning to achieve the homogeneity in groups of students before the beginning of the group lessons. Unlike this “classical” approach, this chapter is based on maintaining the heterogeneity of knowledge and using it as a driving force to learn through interactions among group members.

scholarly journals DEVELOPING ETHICAL ENGINEERS WITH EMPATHY

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Howcroft ◽  
Kate Mercer ◽  
Jennifer Boger
Keyword(s):  
Biomedical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
First Year ◽  
Development Communication ◽  
Implicit Instruction ◽  
Stakeholder Perspectives ◽  
High Level ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Pedagogical Approaches

Empathy-based skill development can help engineering students work towards professional expectations regarding ethical duties. However, there is a lack of explicit, holistic pedagogical approaches toempathy education in engineering. In BME161, a first-year biomedical engineering design course, students received explicit and implicit instruction focused on empathy and ethics. Students were also expected to use empathy-based tools and incorporate stakeholder perspectives in their design process in meaningful and explainable ways. While this approach was successful in incorporating empathybased education into a design course, a more holistic approach is needed throughout the program. Therefore, a high-level framework is presented based on four pillars of empathy development: communication, collaboration, decision-making, and values with a goal of achieving an interpersonal, user-centered, empathic culture of design in engineering students. Future work will focus on developing a more detailed and actionable framework.

scholarly journals Flipping the classroom and turning the grades – a solution to teach unbeloved phase diagrams to engineering students

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Pfennig
Keyword(s):  
Phase Diagrams ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
First Year ◽  
Problem Solving Skills ◽  
Inverted Classroom ◽  
Metal Melts ◽  
Hands On ◽  
High Level ◽  
Thermodynamic Background

Phase diagrams may simply be described as alloying maps in material science. However, the required thermodynamic background knowledge is high level and understanding the cooling procedure of metal melts as well as microstructure of metal alloys is challenging. Common teaching material presents results, but not how to get there and leaves frustrated first year engineering students behind. Knowledge on “how to read” phase diagrams is expected from teachers in advanced courses, but requirements are seldomly met by the students. Teaching phase diagrams in “inverted classroom”szenarios is a method to let the students study the science on their own and then take time to discuss their questions and do extended hands on lectures or exercises in class. Implementing the inverted classroom approach has been proven to be successful in terms of learing outcome, problem solving skills related to phase diagrams and in improving grades. Although the time of preparation is raised by a factor of approximately 4 for 2 four-hour classroom sessions, the positive and sustainable learning outcomes make it fun to teach  and worth the effort.

REVERSE ENGINEERING: TENSION RATCHET DISSECTION PROJECT

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Vanderlaan ◽  
Josh Richert ◽  
James Morrison ◽  
Thomas Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Reverse Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Measurement Techniques ◽  
First Year ◽  
Stepping Stones ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Final Project ◽  
Undergraduate Study ◽  
Solid Edge ◽  
Part Modeling

We are a group of engineering students, in our first year of undergraduate study. We have been selected from one thousand first year students and have competed and won the PACE competition. All engineers share a common general first year, but we have been accepted into Civil and Mechanical engineering. This project was assigned as the final project in the Design and Graphics course. The project we are tasked with, called the Cornerstone Design Project, is to first dissect a product, discover how it works, dimension each part and create a fully assembled model using CAD software (Solid Edge V20 in our case). As part of discovering how it works we must benchmark it so the device can be compared with competing products. The goal of the project is to develop a full understanding of part modeling and assembly in Solid Edge, learn proper measurement techniques, and learn the process of reverse engineering and product dissection. All of these tasks were stepping stones to help us fully understand how the device, and all its components, work.

Implementation of the Second-year course in an Engineering Professional Spine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umar Iqbal ◽  
Deena Salem ◽  
David Strong
Keyword(s):  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Research University ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Employability Skills ◽  
First Year ◽  
Computer Engineering ◽  
Core Courses ◽  
Second Year ◽  
First Time ◽  
Academic Year

The objective of this paper is to document the experience of developing and implementing a second-year course in an engineering professional spine that was developed in a first-tier research university and relies on project-based core courses. The main objective of this spine is to develop the students’ cognitive and employability skills that will allow them to stand out from the crowd of other engineering graduates.The spine was developed and delivered for the first time in the academic year 2010-2011 for first-year general engineering students. In the year 2011-2012, those students joined different programs, and accordingly the second-year course was tailored to align with the different programs’ learning outcomes. This paper discusses the development and implementation of the course in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department.

First-Year Engineering Computing Courses in Canadian Engineering Programs

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Maw ◽  
Janice Miller Young ◽  
Alexis Morris
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Expected Value ◽  
Knowledge Development ◽  
First Year ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Engineering Programs ◽  
Digital Computation ◽  
Pedagogical Philosophies ◽  
Introductory Computing

Most Canadian engineering students take a computing course in their first year that introduces them to digital computation. The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board does not specify the language(s) that can or should be used for instruction. As a result, a variety of languages are used across Canada. This study examines which languages are used in degree-granting institutions, currently and in the recent past. It also examines why institutions have chosen the languages that they currently use. In addition to the language used in instruction, the types and hours of instruction are also analyzed. Methods of instruction and evaluation are compared, as well as the pedagogical philosophies of the different programs with respect to introductory computing. Finally, a comparison of the expected value of this course to graduates is also presented. We found a more diverse landscape for introductory computing courses than anticipated, in most respects. The guiding ethos at most institutions is skill and knowledge development, especially around problem solving in an engineering context. The methods to achieve this are quite varied, and so are the languages employed in such courses. Most programs currently use C/C++, Matlab, VB and/or Python.

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