The idea of the “flipped classroom” is a relatively new concept in education that has become increasingly popular. Instructors who flip their classrooms reverse the roles of school work and homework by recording video lectures for students to watch before coming to class. Students then work on their homework in the classroom while the instructor is present to help them. Very little research has been done on the effectiveness of the flipped classroom to determine if students can perform better on exams by learning in a flipped classroom environment, especially for high school demographics. The purpose of this research is to add to the body of knowledge and help provide data to investigate how well students learn physics content by using the flipped classroom in a high school physics class and identify students' attitudes towards the flipped classroom. Seven periods of Physics with Technology at Lone Peak High School in Highland, UT were used in this study. Three of the classes were randomly assigned to be “flipped” while the other four were taught using what is considered a “traditional” method of instruction of physics, which is based on a guided inquiry method. The pacing and content was matched each day and all classes participated in the same labs, homework, quizzes and tests. The defining difference is the method which the content is covered. The flipped classes watched video lectures at home to learn the majority of the content, then did what is traditionally known as “homework” in class with the teacher present to help. In this study, it was found that there was no statistically or practically significant difference in mean test scores for the first three units in a high school Physics with Technology class. Student responses on a survey also showed very little statistically different in the students' attitudes towards the classroom environment in either instructional method.

University education across history and contexts aimed for a myriad of purposes, from the advancement of knowledge to educating citizens and contributing to the social good. With the rise of universities functioning in a market economy, and navigating higher education institutions' public role, some of the university purposes are constantly debated, and often without accounting for the students' perspectives. The purpose of this qualitative multi-case study is to explore the students' perspectives on the purpose of enrolling in a higher education institution and obtaining an engineering higher education degree. Each case is focused on a higher education institution, for a total of four institutions across the U.S. and England. The embedded units of analysis focus on twenty (20) undergraduate chemical engineering students' narratives from the time they enroll in those institutions to the time they graduate to answer the following two main research questions: RQ 1: What are the perspectives of undergraduate engineering students towards the purpose of higher education? RQ 2: How, if at all, do undergraduate engineering students' perspectives of the purpose of higher education change throughout their degree? The Capabilities Approach is used as the main theoretical framing. The framework is concerned with the question of what a person is able to do and be. It also provides a perspective on thinking about the purposes of education in terms of instrumental, intrinsic, and social values. Results show a variety of perspectives and reasons why students pursue an engineering degree, mainly expressed in terms of career-driven purposes and personal-driven purposes. Fulfilling being good at math and science, seeking a job for purposes beyond individualistic reasons, and personal growth were some of the common purposes mentioned by the students. In addition, more students than not maintained a fixed perspective throughout their undergraduate years. This research is set to address the problem of the neglect of the students' voices in the literature and to address the lack of research on longitudinal studies, higher education, and capabilities approach within the engineering education space. / Doctor of Philosophy / University education across history and contexts aimed for a myriad of purposes, from the advancement of knowledge to educating citizens and contributing to the social good. With the rise of universities functioning in a market economy, and navigating the institutions' public role, some of the university purposes are constantly debated, and often without accounting for the students' perspectives. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the students' perspectives on the purpose of enrolling in a higher education institution and obtaining an engineering higher education degree. I focused my study on four institutions across the U.S. and England. Within each institution, I interviewed undergraduate chemical engineering students from the time they started their degree till the time they graduated to answer the following main research question: RQ: What are the perspectives of undergraduate engineering students towards the purpose of higher education? To help position the study, I used the Capabilities Approach framework. The framework is concerned with the question of what a person is able to do and be. It also provides a perspective on thinking about the purposes of education in terms of different values including seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge and helping in the community. Results show a variety of perspectives and reasons why students pursue an engineering degree. Fulfilling being good at math and science, seeking a job for purposes beyond individual reasons, and personal growth were some of the common purposes. In addition, more students than not maintained a fixed perspective on why they chose to enroll in university throughout their undergraduate years. This research is set to amplify students' voices and add to longitudinal research studies in the engineering education literature space.

While engineering service-learning projects are seen as a favorable way for students to reinforce curricular learning while gaining cultural awareness, the outcomes of these projects center student benefits over partner community wellbeing. For these projects, and in other engineering contexts, various scholar-activists have conceptualized numerous principles and methods to center justice and equity in engineering outcomes. This research project and its associated intervention involved collecting scholarship and methods in engineering and social justice, and attempted to integrate these ideas into the practices of a local humanitarian service-learning engineering team. The collected scholarship centered around the topics of Design Justice, feminist qualitative science & technology studies, and Latin American decolonial theory. In partnership with the Engineers Without Borders Cal Poly Local projects team, following the frameworks of critical participatory action research and community autoethnography, the author spent time with the team to build relationships and facilitated presentations, dialogues, and activities around the collected scholarship. Two sets of semi-structured interviews were conducted before and after the intervention, and qualitative data was analyzed using iterative thematic inquiry. This project found that a local humanitarian engineering-service learning environment was a suitable space to advocate alternative design principles and methods, and that students expressed a desire to learn more about these topics, as well as utilize and share these resources with their friends and in other contexts such as their professional careers. Students experienced moderate amounts of success in using the collected scholarship to modify their project practices, specifically their plans for community assessment. These results imply that other spaces and organizations with an explicit focus on service or social justice may be ideal environments to attempt to implement alternative design principles, and that more efforts to enable students to learn about and share alternative principles could have lasting effects.

As the demand for programming skills in today’s job market is rapidly increasing for disciplines outside of computing, CS courses have experienced spikes in enrollment for non-majors. Students in disciplines including art, design and biological sciences are now often required to take introductory CS courses. Previous research has shown the role of growth mindset, self-efficacy and relevance in student success within CS but such metrics are largely unknown for non-majors. In this thesis, we surveyed non-majors in CS1 at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo during the early and late weeks of the quarter to gain insights on their growth mindset, their self-efficacy and the perceived relevance of the course to their lives. In our analysis, we discovered that non-majors’ levels of growth mindset and of self-efficacy decreased throughout the duration of CS1 with additional differences by gender. However, non-majors largely found that the material covered in CS1 was highly relevant to their academic and professional careers despite being challenged by it. These findings provide important insights into the experiences of non-majors learning to code and can help better serve a more diverse population of students.

This thesis discusses the development of an advanced real-time embedded systems course offered at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, which aims to prepare students to design modern complex real-time embedded systems. It describes the goals of the real-time embedded systems curriculum, which includes an introductory and advanced course. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges of creating a successful advanced real-time embedded systems course and proposes changes to the current advanced real-time embedded systems course in response to those challenges.

yes / The introduction in the early 1990s of the world wide web was a significant factor in the creation of a global information society, allowing new possibilities to work, entertain and communicate, from home, at the workplace or on the move. In recent years, there have been significant advances in information technology (IT), while a new generation of applications that are able to harness the power of the world wide web has been introduced under the banner of Web 2.0. The increased capabilities of IT and the nature of Web 2.0 applications have attracted interest from the academic community as a means of enhancing the delivery of higher education. This paper considers the implications of introducing technology into the higher education sector from the perspectives of academic staff and students, with particular emphasis on the use of technology and Web 2.0 applications, and the relationship between technology and teaching and learning.

https://dc.etsu.edu/engr-1110-oer/1003/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/engr-1110-oer/1004/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/engr-1110-oer/1008/thumbnail.jpg

https://dc.etsu.edu/engr-1110-oer/1012/thumbnail.jpg