The dominant pedagogy for engineering educations still remains chalk and talk despite the large body of education research that demonstrates its ineffectiveness. Traditional approaches to structural engineering education place a heavy emphasis on lecture-based delivery of the theories of structural analysis and the behaviour of common constructions materials. Design projects are given varying emphasis at different institutions, but are frequently left to the final year of the course. Assessment weighting often heavily favours examinations over project work. In recent years, the engineering profession and the bodies responsible for accrediting engineering programs have called for change in assessment and teaching practices.This study proposed that the use of design projects in structural engineering is an effective method of learning that models industrial practice. Projects enable students to understand the synthesis of structural analysis, material behaviour and availability, constructability and economic reality that occurs in the professional practice of structural engineering. To examine effectiveness of project-based learning in structural engineering a case study was undertaken in a third year undergraduate course of a civil engineering program in South Australia.This thesis first provides some background to structural engineering and current practice in structural engineering education. Project-based learning as applied to engineering is also examined. The case study design and data collection are then discussed. The study was developed around a conceptual framework for educational evaluation that differentiates between the intended, implemented, perceived and achieved curriculum. The intended curriculum, defined as the original vision underlying a curriculum, was developed through a literature review that considered the requirements of industry and ++ / engineering accreditation bodies. The degree to which the intended curriculum was successfully implemented in the course was evaluated through video-tapes of lessons, journal records and interviews. The actual learning experiences as perceived or experienced by the students, was evaluated through student journals, interviews and two questionnaires, one of which was also administered to a senior structural engineering industry group to enable a comparison between the student and industry groups perceptions of the importance of certain skills in the engineering profession. The achieved curriculum, defined as the resulting learning outcomes of the students, was also examined. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the findings of the study as well as their significance and limitations and then considers the possible extensions of project-based learning to other areas of engineering and some of the issues that will need to be addressed for this to occur.

This qualitative study inquired into the personal experience of three engineering professors and one associate dean who participated in an engineering education coalition—the Foundation Coalition—a National Science Foundation-funded project which attempted to reform undergraduate engineering curricula at six U.S. institutions of higher education. Through analysis of occupational life histories, and data from a larger study of curricular change processes, two dominant social narratives emerged. Cultural attributes of academia were conceptualized as a master narrative. The reform effort emerged as a counter-narrative by calling for a “culture change” in engineering education. I describe five areas where the counter-narrative challenged the master narrative: the rationale and need for educational change, the nature of faculty work, disciplinary relationships, relationships among faculty, and the incentive and reward system. The counter-narrative of reform promoted curricular and pedagogical change, more interdisciplinary and integrated foundations for engineering education, and encouraged partnerships and community over faculty isolation and autonomy. The counter-narrative challenged faculty complicity with the master narrative and offered alternative ways of viewing their role as faculty in higher education. The master and counter-narratives clashed over the nature of faculty work in research universities, fueling the ongoing debate about the relative value of research and teaching and the associated reward system. This study found that the four participants used different strategies to navigate the conflict between the two social narratives. One participant was informed by an ideal vision of engineering education, and never relinquished the quest for an opportunity to realize that vision. Another professor, energized by the collaborative environment created by the Coalition, continued to find creative avenues to partner with others to improve engineering education. A third participant worked, through compromise and accommodation, to craft an improved curriculum that worked within the local institutional culture. And finally, an associate dean, who rejected the duality of the master/counter-narrative worldview, reframed the reform effort by encouraging faculty working in educational change to view their work as scholarship. The findings from this study support faculty engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning and encourage faculty developers to find ways of supporting faculty in that effort.

This qualitative study inquired into the personal experience of three engineering professors and one associate dean who participated in an engineering education coalition—the Foundation Coalition—a National Science Foundation-funded project which attempted to reform undergraduate engineering curricula at six U.S. institutions of higher education. Through analysis of occupational life histories, and data from a larger study of curricular change processes, two dominant social narratives emerged. Cultural attributes of academia were conceptualized as a master narrative. The reform effort emerged as a counter-narrative by calling for a “culture change” in engineering education. I describe five areas where the counter-narrative challenged the master narrative: the rationale and need for educational change, the nature of faculty work, disciplinary relationships, relationships among faculty, and the incentive and reward system. The counter-narrative of reform promoted curricular and pedagogical change, more interdisciplinary and integrated foundations for engineering education, and encouraged partnerships and community over faculty isolation and autonomy. The counter-narrative challenged faculty complicity with the master narrative and offered alternative ways of viewing their role as faculty in higher education. The master and counter-narratives clashed over the nature of faculty work in research universities, fueling the ongoing debate about the relative value of research and teaching and the associated reward system. This study found that the four participants used different strategies to navigate the conflict between the two social narratives. One participant was informed by an ideal vision of engineering education, and never relinquished the quest for an opportunity to realize that vision. Another professor, energized by the collaborative environment created by the Coalition, continued to find creative avenues to partner with others to improve engineering education. A third participant worked, through compromise and accommodation, to craft an improved curriculum that worked within the local institutional culture. And finally, an associate dean, who rejected the duality of the master/counter-narrative worldview, reframed the reform effort by encouraging faculty working in educational change to view their work as scholarship. The findings from this study support faculty engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning and encourage faculty developers to find ways of supporting faculty in that effort.

Preparing engineering students for interdisciplinary practice in the workplace requires a meaningful understanding of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice. Such an understanding could help to address the ongoing issues and concerns of the interdisciplinary learning of engineering students. The review of literature on interdisciplinary engineering education raises a major concern of the speculative approach to formulating learning outcomes of interdisciplinary engineering education, which results from the lack of understanding of how practising engineers engage in interdisciplinary learning in their workplaces. This thesis directly addresses this concern by providing the empirical evidence for a number of learning outcomes, and by identifying the associated learning practices found in three cases of interdisciplinary collaborations between engineers and life science practitioners. It also enhances the understanding of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice by providing a detailed explanation of why engineers are more likely to engage in those learning practices and how they are more likely to achieve the learning outcomes. The main contribution of this thesis is in assembling the identified learning outcomes and the associated learning practices into one theoretical framework that embodies both the description and the explanation of interdisciplinary learning in engineering practice for a particular subclass – engineering for the life sciences. The framework describes interdisciplinary learning in terms of four epistemic practices and four learning outcomes. Additionally, it includes a contingent causal explanation for those practices and outcomes by validating the underlying causal relationships. The findings of this research could inform the formulation of learning outcomes and the deployment of learning practices in interdisciplinary engineering curricular. In addition, the generalisation of the findings to the education domain suggests practices that can help university students in their intellectual development.

The unique contribution to knowledge of this research is the study of the development of judgement capacity in apprentice and undergraduate engineering learners in Activity Led Learning (ALL) environments. Four case studies of engineering students investigated the learners' experiences of making judgements in various engineering undergraduate and apprenticeship programmes. A phenomenological research methodology was used to infer the learner's judgements from the learners' dialogues and actions that were observed during the learning activity. The findings of the study indicate that the experience and incidence of the learners' exertion of judgement is dependent upon the construct of the ALL environment to provide a problem space with potential for disjuncture, and the intentionality of the learners. The learners did not solve problems by a linear progression but repeatedly re-activated experiences and knowledge, exercising judgements until the states of disjuncture were satisfied leading to the conclusion of the problem. Heuristic judgements that may result in decision making errors tended to dominate the problem spaces though their incidence did not appear to be influenced by the technical or socio-technical demands of the project problem spaces. This thesis concludes that in ALL environments, projects of sufficient length and complexity similar to realistic professional practice, may enable students to acquire the practice of better judgement through disjuncture and by re-activating learning experiences and importing analogies into new problem spaces. However, to acquire skills and knowledge to improve judgement capacity, requires specific and purposeful interventions within ALL that enable the learner to know when heuristic judgements are reliable or otherwise unreliable, and acquiring reasoning strategies to compensate for the effects. It is proposed that in such interventions the learner learns to record their own judgements as they are exerted and to reflect critically on those judgements and their consequences. It also requires that any ALL project that aims to promote judgement capacity has in place assessment instruments that specifically consider the learner effort in the self-development of judgement.

<p>  </p> <p>The concept of computational thinking (CT) has become more prevalent across the engineering education research and teaching landscape. Yet much of the research to date has been more definitional and has not offered many ways to convert CT theory to practice. One prominent set of tools used across engineering disciplines is modeling and simulation, which allows students to create a representation of the outside world as they understand it. </p> <p>This three-paper dissertation connects modeling and simulation skills with eliciting CT by leveraging model-based reasoning as a theoretical framework. A learning design was created and delivered here via design-based research that includes educational frameworks such as productive failure and model-eliciting activities (MEAs) to structure the modeling activity within a classroom setting. The designed learning intervention used a four-part sequence to scaffold the modeling activity in the classroom: (1) planning the model, (2) building the model, (3) evaluating the model, and (4) reflecting on the model. A case study of a final-year capstone course in biological engineering implemented the four-week designed learning intervention as part of the course. </p> <p>The guiding research question for the study was <em>how do modeling and simulation activities elicit computational thinking practices in the context of undergraduate engineering education? </em>To approach this question, data were collected in audio transcripts and student-generated artifacts to identify areas where the modeling activity elicited different forms of CT in the student work. The first study examined how CT was elicited within the model-building phase and developed an initial codebook for CT practices and outcomes using thematic analysis. The second and third studies built upon that codebook and further the outcomes by analyzing the modeling activity's planning and evaluating/reflecting phases. The results indicate that CT is used throughout the entire modeling and simulation process as students engage in model-based reasoning. The identified CT practices of abstraction, algorithmic thinking, evaluation, generalization, and decomposition emerged from a thematic analysis, and each practice was further characterized and refined into a set of outcomes. Furthermore, each phase of the modeling activity emphasized unique CT outcomes suggesting that students would benefit from enacting the entire modeling and simulation process to acquire and practice a diverse range of CT outcomes. </p>

Machinists are skilled tradespeople responsible for running a variety of machine tools to produce precision components for end-users or use in other manufacturing. This project identifies the current and future change in the number of machinists in the Tri-Cities area, especially the five-county service area of Northeast State Community College. Using an industry survey, the need for machinists is identified and evaluated to understand local employers’ needs. The results indicate industry needs more machinist to keep up with demand, as 6 out of 14 companies have open positions and, 8 reported difficulty filling openings. Furthermore, most companies are growing or stable overall, but have an average 15% of their machinists eligible to retire. The survey results show a need for more students to enroll in programs, such as the Machine Tool degree, or even for regional policy changes to encourage more young people to pursue machining.

The purpose of this study was (1) to develop a guideline for cooperative education; (2) to determine the current status of cooperative vocational education in Utah; and (3) to compare current practices with the established guideline. This study was completed in two parts. The first part involved the construction and verification of a guideline for cooperative education in Utah; the second, a survey of the current status of cooperative education. A descriptive survey technique was employed to gather data required for determination of the guideline's validity and relevance, and the current status of cooperative education in Utah. All 13 key administrators in the state office, 75 coordinators representing 84 percent of the initial mailings and 112 cooperating employers or 74 percent of the selected sample participated in this study. Opinions from the 13 key administrators in the Utah State Division of Vocational and Technical Education were largely in agreement with the tentative guideline derived from the two nationally accepted guides in cooperative education. Due to the lack of an official guide for cooperative education in Utah, many of the coordinators' interpretations of federal legislation and state regulations were based on their own convenience. Inconsistencies in programs, standards and requirements were frequently found among cooperative programs in Utah. There appear to be some discrepancies existing between the current practices and the established guideline mainly because in a majority of the programs: (1) students spend insufficient numbers of hours in attending school or receiving on- the-job training; (2) schools provide inadequate in-school instruction; and (3) students receive substandard on-the-job supervision.

The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyze community X power actors' responses to a questionnaire, in order to gain information to be used in developing Career Next Step High School Placement Center guidelines. The study was a descriptive research which employed the reputational technique to identify community power actors and the survey technique to gain Information from selected urban schools for comparative purposes. The reputations! technique surveyed 31 Ogden Community power actors and the survey technique was administered to 26 selected urban high schools in Utah. Guidelines were developed for the following major areas: Functions of a Career Next Step High School Placement Center. People and/or organizations to be employed by a school district to work in a placement center. Individuals and/ or organizations that should provide a service to students at the center. Location for a center, individuals to be in charge, and the center's hours Individuals and organizations to be represented on the advisory council. Services to students that should be provided by the center. Analysis of the survey results from the selected urban high schools revealed that: 19 of the responding 24 indicated they had student placement services in their school. 12 of the 19 indicated their school had a Career Next Step Placement Center. 6 of the 19 indicated their school had a counseling and guidance placement service. One of the 19 schools Indicated they had a cooperative education placement service. Of the 5 schools that indicated they did not have a placement service at their school, 4 indicated they thought a Career Next Step High School Placement Center would best serve their school's needs. The remaining one school thought a counseling and guidance placement service would best serve that school. In comparing the responses from the selected 26 urban high schools to the developed guidelines for a Career Next Step High School Placement Center, from community power actor responses, there were 25 items of difference determined.

About half of the students that are declared engineering majors end up leaving engineering within their first two years at the university. This happens following the required math and science courses that these students must take before getting into the technical engineering coursework. There are two systems that students must be a part of at the university to feel comfortable and have the desire to continue on in their degree. These include the academic system and the social system. The experiences engineering students have during their first required math course, Calculus I, is likely not promoting integration into these two systems. This study analyzed student grade data from Calculus I for trends about student persistence in engineering, along with interviewing students about their experience in Calculus I. These analyses revealed that students do not integrate into the social system of engineering during this course and only persisting students show some positive signs of integration into the academic system. This indicates that there are many gaps in the engineering student experience during their early career that can help these students feel like they belong in engineering and want to stay. Fortunately, there are many areas that can easily be remedied to provide a better social and academic experience in Calculus I to help increase the number of students that remain in engineering until graduation.