<p>This research proposes a model for equitable and accessible competency-based regulatory sciences education in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to safe, quality, and effective medical products in sub-Saharan Africa is contingent on strong National Medicines Regulatory Authorities (NMRA) and a strong, highly skilled workforce of regulatory scientists. The literature acknowledges that sub-Saharan Africa has a critical skilled workforce gap in regulatory scientists and an immediate need to develop strategies for sustained human capacity development in regulatory sciences. This need is significantly heightened because of rapidly evolving advances in health and medical product technologies. And as the continent moves towards regulatory harmonization and the deployment of the African Medicines Agency, the continent needs to have a skilled and portable workforce. First, using the framework synthesis type of systematic review of the literature and the survey of experts in regulatory sciences, the research developed a comprehensive competency framework (CF) to serve as the bedrock for developing a competency-based curriculum and training. Next, an online, fully asynchronous proof-of-concept (POC) competency-based regulatory sciences education (CBRSE) module was designed and deployed based on the learning sciences theories. The purposive sampling technique recruited seventeen (n = 17) participants from the Purdue Masters’ Biotechnology Innovation and Regulatory Sciences (BIRS) African cohort to engage in the POC module. The module was evaluated using an end-of-module survey (a modified Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument), indices of students’ engagement, and performance assessments. The CF has eighty-eight (n = 88) competence statements in five clusters, eighty-six (n = 86) of which were ranked as mandatory and two as supplementary competencies. Fourteen (n = 14) students completed the POC module. The triangulation of results from the end-of-module survey, indices of students’ engagement, and performance assessments show that the POC module assisted students in achieving the desired competencies. The research also shows that the dialectics component of the module was not a great enabler of students’ learning. Future researchers, developmental partners, and NMRA could use the competency framework and the CBRSE module’s model to develop education and continuous professional development training in sub-Saharan Africa. </p>

<h2>Abstract</h2><p dir="ltr">Currently, only 22% of high school graduates meet the basic requirements for one or more college courses in mathematics, science, reading, or English signifying fewer students with the skills to enter careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (Smithsonian Science Education Center, 2015). In contrast, science and engineering employment in the United States has grown more rapidly than the overall workforce and now represents 5% of all jobs which is projected to increase to 8% by 2029 (Khan et al., 2020). The current statistics represent a future labor force entering the labor market without the skills needed to obtain a large portion of future occupations. To bridge this gap, the U.S. Federal government outlined a vision with three goals to provide Americans access to high-quality STEM education to increase the skills of the future workforce (National Science & Technology Council, 2018). The three goals include 1) building a strong foundation for STEM literacy; 2) increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM; 3) preparing the STEM workers for the future (National Science & Technology Council, 2018). As the economy and workforce develop in future years, students will require a high-quality STEM education to enter this growing workforce to meet the goals of the federal government and the needs of future occupations. Robotic platforms are diverse and have the ability to provide students with instant feedback, integrate multiple subjects during the design challenge, and support self-efficacy development through mastery events where students practice skills until they receive a favorable result. Robotics in a life-centered context could interest a diverse range of young adults into STEM career fields. This study implements robotic learning activies in an assistive technology context which centers around improving the lives of living organisms.</p>

Background and Research Questions: The purpose of this study is to investigate and understand the motivations, experiences, and decision-making processes of a group of professional engineers who decided to switch their career pathway from the engineering industry to education and teaching during their mid-age. Based on the Social Cognitive Career and Motivation Theory and Self-Efficacy Theory, the study was guided by a research question, why would professional engineers decide to switch their career pathway from the engineering industry to education and teaching during their mid-age, particularly in Australia? What are their motivations?  Methodology: In line with the general inductive approach, focus group activity, remarkable item sharing, and member-checking interviews were used to collect in-depth sharing and stories from six participants via the online platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the guidelines of the grounded theory approach, three themes and six subthemes were yielded.  Findings: Personal consideration, surrounding environments and individuals, and interests in career development are the main themes in order to answer the research questions. More importantly, the findings indicated that the sense of belonging, behaviours of others, politics, the COVID-19 pandemic, and career development played significant roles in the motivations, experiences, and decision-making processes of a group of professional engineers who decided to switch their career pathway from the engineering industry to education and teaching during their mid-age.  Contribution to the Practice and Values: This study outlined the motivations, experiences, and decision-making processes of professional engineers who decided to switch careers from the engineering industry to education and teaching during their mid-age. The results of this study would fill the research gaps in human resources and workforce management for university lecturers. University leaders, government agencies, human resources planners, and researchers may use this study as the blueprint to reform and upgrade the current policies in teachers’ shortages.

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Soft System Approaches have been developed worldwide to help problem-solvers and decision-makers develop solutions to complex problems, such as aerospace systems. Soft System Approaches were designed to help lower the disorder of developing a complex system by increasing understanding of a situation. Four Soft System Approaches were investigated, two from the West and two from the East. Within the context of the paper, the West refers to thought patterns associated with thinkers and scientists in Europe and North America, and the East refers to those from and around China. The two from the West are Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology and Fran Ackerman and Colin Eden’s Strategic Options Development and Analysis, and from the East they are Qian Xuesen’s Meta-Synthetic Approach and Jifa Gu and Zhichang Zhu’s Wuli-Shili-Renli Approach. The four approaches were selected due to their prevalence and notoriety within the Soft System Approach research. The Western Soft System Approaches were created as a direct response to reductionism and are more holistic than Hard System Approaches; however, they are classified as systematic due to their structure. The approaches are tools that can be deployed for a specific task. Eastern Soft System Approaches rooted in Eastern philosophy went from holism to reductionism to a unity of the two. There is no one-size-fits-all approach; therefore, approaches that seek to balance reductionism and holism and give guidance and structure while inviting in other methods. The Eastern approaches are classified as framework Soft System Approaches, which provide structure and guidance but not a formula. Systematic approaches are better for determining a course of action, while framework approaches are better for guiding a whole program. The Eastern approaches covered can and do incorporate other methods, including each other. Depending on the problem and problem solver, the systematic or framework approach may be better suited. Overall, however, the framework approach will be able to solve the most varied problems due to the lack of prescriptiveness and the use of other approaches. Knowing the difference between the approaches and how they can be used helps manage the development of complex aerospace systems.

<p dir="ltr">Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and image recognition have significantly enhanced the monitoring of marine wildlife populations, which serve as valuable indicators of environmental changes and impacts. However, existing marine wildlife datasets face substantial challenges, including limited realistic data, missing annotations, imbalanced (long-tailed) class distributions, fine-grained class variations, and hierarchical classification complexities.</p><p dir="ltr">In this thesis, a novel approach to realistic marine wildlife detection is proposed, using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) designed to perform multiple vision-based tasks simultaneously. This approach optimizes resource utilization in complex perception systems and enables AUVs to perform wildlife recognition in tandem with core perception functions such as target localization. By leveraging an efficient object detection architecture and loss-based training methods, this work addresses key challenges such as incomplete annotations and the computational constraints of AUV platforms.</p><p dir="ltr">Building on this, this thesis introduces a fine-grained hierarchical classifier capable of adapting to unknown class distributions during testing. By integrating a self-supervised ensemble learning technique with a hierarchical classifier architecture, the proposed solution demonstrates better performance, surpassing baseline models in 7 of 9 evaluation metrics across three diverse test distributions. </p><p dir="ltr">In addition to these contributions to AUV perception systems, we develop methods to prepare engineers for using and developing AUV systems. These methods form a practical and comprehensive curriculum for autonomous systems development, focused on equipping engineers with the skills to deploy advanced perception, planning, and control systems. This curriculum bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementation, laying a strong foundation for the next generation of autonomy engineers.</p><p dir="ltr">These three contributions address needs for autonomous AUVs through workforce development and a robust online-offline pipeline for wildlife image recognition and labeling, leveraging the persistent autonomy capabilities of AUVs. By addressing critical technological and educational gaps, this thesis advances marine autonomy and deep learning, making significant strides toward marine wildlife conservation and sustainable ocean monitoring.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This three-article dissertation explores Learning by Evaluating (LbE), an educational approach that enhances student learning through the process of assessing and providing feedback on peer work. Leveraging principles of comparative judgement, students evaluate pairs of exemplars side-by-side to determine which is better and provide a rational for their decision, actively engaging in the assessment process. Students engage in critical thinking to justify their decisions, enhancing their understanding of the task at hand by discerning quality where they can apply these principles to their own assignments. Teachers may use this as a formative assessment tool to elicit student insights and misconceptions to better utilize teaching strategies and address specific needs. Engaging students in feedback allows teachers and students to communicate about a shared value structure, making the design process more comprehensive and manageable. Importantly, teachers have control over the duration of student engagement with LbE in the classroom. Once students have started the decision-making process, teachers can use a website interface to bring the session to a close, ensuring that all students finish simultaneously. Once these sessions have been created, they can be reused, further enhancing the efficiency of LbE in the classroom.</p><p dir="ltr">An important part of this process is the selection of exemplars for student evaluation. In my first paper, I engage in a systematic literature review of 33 articles on exemplars and their influence on the student learning experience in secondary and post-secondary education. Through this process, nine key themes were identified: clarity of instruction, learner focus, motivation for learning, student reflection on learning, building student self-efficacy, identifying instructional challenges, providing contrasting cases, the relationship between exemplar quality and student work quality, and raising the bar for learning outcomes. Findings suggest that the selection of exemplars has a significant influence over student motivation, understanding, and application, and that time should be taken not only to identify these items, but to use them as a means to discuss and clarify expectations to enhance the learning experience.</p><p dir="ltr">After establishing the educational merits in the first paper, I explore how selected pre-engineering teachers integrate LbE into their classrooms. To do this I use a design-based research approach in my second paper to both analyze and optimize the implementation of this method in a secondary STEM education setting through an investigation of student comments and justifications throughout the design process for five teachers after the first year of piloting the program in their classrooms. Findings show diverse student engagement and decision-making patterns, highlighting the importance of strategic integration of Learning by Evaluating for both students and educators.</p><p dir="ltr">In my final paper, recognizing that much of the research of Learning by Evaluating has focused on student outcomes in groups, I investigate the benefits on students as individuals. Using quasi-experimental research, a conceptual replication study was initiated to investigate the influence of Learning by Evaluating of 325 undergraduate students in an entry-level design thinking course as they prepare for and conduct qualitative research interviews. While the original study used LbE to have students develop PoV statements as a group, this replication study builds on that research by using the same methods and a similar sample of students from the same course, but shifts the focus to individual interviews to inform the PoV problem statement. The findings show that students in the treatment group prepared more open-ended questions, indicating improved interview preparation, however, the actual length of interviews showed no significant improvement. The study used random sampling and independent samples t-tests to compare treatment and control groups, with results suggesting that this is an effective pedagogical strategy for individualized work, highlighting its value for educators and researchers in optimizing comparative judgement to enhance student learning experiences.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p>

Upon IRB approval, a corpus of 1,192 texts consisting of three assignments written by a total of 1,736 first year engineering students was compiled, and 117 pedagogical materials were collected. Using an iterative quantitative-qualitative approach to written discourse analysis, instances of formulaic language (4- and 6-word sequences) were identified in the corpus; formulaic language was then coded for the rhetorical functions expected in problem statements as qualitatively identified in the pedagogical materials. Additionally, three discourse-based interviews were conducted with First-year Engineering Faculty. Interview data was coded for themes of effective communication and used to triangulate the findings from the corpus analysis.

Um mundo em mudanças, com necessidades crescentes de soluções globais de ciência e tecnologia para seus problemas, faz da demanda por cientistas e engenheiros uma questão importante para a competitividade e o desenvolvimento econômico e social de qualquer país. Jovens devem ser cada vez mais motivados e preparados na educação básica para proporcionar à sociedade não só mais, mas melhores estudantes universitários e profissionais de engenharia. Assim, conhecer as atitudes, pensamentos, opiniões e percepções dos pré-universitários em relação à engenharia é de fundamental importância para atuar no aumento do contingente de futuros engenheiros e para predizer sua persistência na área. Por ser no ensino médio que os jovens fazem as primeiras escolhas sobre suas carreiras, a participação no desenvolvimento de projetos investigativos e na apresentação em feiras de ciências parece desempenhar importante papel não só nessa decisão, mas no desenvolvimento de habilidades e competências indispensáveis ao sucesso em qualquer carreira profissional, principalmente para a engenharia. Para conhecer e analisar o universo dos estudantes do ensino médio, neste contexto, foram aplicados questionários em cinco situações de pesquisa, cujo público alvo eram jovens pré-universitários, envolvidos ou não com atividades de feiras de ciências, e, em uma sexta situação, aos professores. Com base nos dados deste trabalho, os jovens, de forma geral, apresentaram atitudes e percepções positivas em relação à engenharia e aos engenheiros, independente do gênero, da idade, do tipo de escola e do tipo de ensino médio que frequentam. No entanto, os estudantes envolvidos com o desenvolvimento de projetos investigativos e participação em feiras de ciências revelaram atitudes mais positivas e mais autoconfiança do que os não envolvidos. A intenção de cursar engenharia se mostrou em alta para todas as situações de pesquisa, principalmente nas áreas de civil e elétrica. Além disso, tanto os jovens como os professores reconheceram nas atividades de desenvolvimento de projetos investigativos e de participação de feiras de ciências, oportunidades para o aperfeiçoamento de habilidades e competências necessárias para o sucesso profissional no mundo globalizado. Esta pesquisa foi conduzida para conhecer e analisar esse universo do ensino médio em relação à engenharia com a intenção de fornecer subsídios para atuar no aumento do contingente de futuros engenheiros e para predizer sua persistência na área. Além disso, espera-se que os resultados dessa pesquisa possam, ainda, contribuir e subsidiar a elaboração de programas e propostas para mudanças no ensino médio, a fim de atender às necessidades de despertar, desenvolver e aperfeiçoar as novas habilidades e competências impostas pelo século XXI. / A changing world, with increasing needs of global science and technology solutions, makes the demand for scientists and engineers a major issue for competitiveness and economic and social development of any country. Young people should be increasingly motivated and prepared in K-12 education in order to provide society with not only more, but better undergraduate students and engineering professionals. Thus, the knowledge of attitudes, thoughts, opinions and perceptions of preuniversity students regarding engineering is crucial to act on increasing the number of future engineers and to predict their persistence in the area. Because it is in high school that young people make their first choices about careers, participating in the development of science research projects and presentation at science fairs may play an important role not only in this decision, but in the development of essential skills and competencies to succeed in any career, especially in engineering. To understand and analyze the universe of high school students, in this context, questionnaires were applied in five research situations, whose target audience were young pre-university students, involved or not in science fair activities, and in another situation with teachers. Based on this research data, , young people had positive attitudes and perceptions towards engineering and engineers, regardless of gender, age, type of school and type of high school course attended. However, students involved with the development of research projects and participation in science fairs showed more positive attitudes and more self-confidence than those not involved. The intention of studying engineering was high in all research situations, particularly in the areas of civil and electrical engineering. Furthermore, both youth and teachers recognized in the activities related to the development of research projects and participation in science fair, opportunities to develop skills and competencies necessary for professional success in a globalized world. This research was conducted to understand and analyze the universe of secondary education students related to engineering and engineers with the intention to support future actions on increasing the number of future engineers and to predict their persistence in the area. Moreover, it is expected that results of this research may also contribute to and support the development of governmental programs and proposals for high school curricula changes in in order to meet the needs of awakening, developing and enhancing new XXI century skills and competencies.

[pt] A concepção e modelagem de objetos educacionais para compreensão da dinâmica de motocicletas/bicicletas em projetos de engenharia têm nesta tese dois objetivos gerais: o entendimento da dinâmica de veículos de duas rodas de bitola zero e a apresentação de solução para o problema de incompatibilidade, ainda que parcial, do perfil do formando em engenharia quando comparado ao desejado pelo mercado de trabalho. Para cumprir com o primeiro objetivo, este trabalho desenvolve a modelagem de bicicletas e motocicletas utilizando as técnicas de Grafo de Ligação e Fluxo de Potência, para em seguida descrever aparatos educacionais em desenvolvimento no LDSM (Laboratório de Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Mecatrônicos da PUC-Rio) projetados para auxiliar no entendimento desses veículos. No intuito de conseguir responder à questão que envolve o segundo objetivo geral, este trabalho apresenta um breve estudo sobre aprendizagem ativa para então, passando pela análise dos projetos pedagógicos dos cursos de engenharia mecânica e de controle e automação, propor solução para uma melhor formação do engenheiro utilizando a metodologia de aprendizagem ativa, denominada PBL. O autor emprega os conhecimentos obtidos ao alcançar o primeiro objetivo para propor a utilização de projetos criados em torno dos veículos em questão como ferramentas do processo de ensino/aprendizagem. Através de pesquisas bibliográficas e de comparação do alcance e da abrangência entre, por um lado, a organização curricular vigente e, por outro, aquela proposta utilizando a metodologia de aprendizagem ativa, o autor evidencia que esta última cumpre satisfatoriamente com o rigor da formação técnica do engenheiro. Através de pesquisas bibliográficas e experimentação em aula, ele verifica que a nova organização curricular pode ir além e cobrir também as competências não ligadas à formação técnica que a atual organização não consegue contemplar satisfatoriamente, como consciência socioambiental e ética profissional, entre outras. Por fim o trabalho indica novos caminhos a serem seguidos, tanto na modelagem de tais veículos, como no estudo e na utilização da metodologia pesquisada. / [en] The conception and modeling of educational objects for understanding of motorcycles/bicycles dynamics in engineering design have in this thesis two general objectives: understanding the dynamics of two wheels vehicles of gage zero and resenting the solution for the incompatibility problem, even if partial, of the engineering graduate profile when referred to the profile desired by the job market. To accomplish with the first goal, this work develops the modeling of bicycles and motorcycles using the Bond Graphs and Power Flow techniques, to then describe education apparatuses developed in LDSM (Mechatronic Systems Development Laboratory of PUC-Rio) designed to aid in the understanding of those vehicles. In order to answer the question that involves the second general objective, this work presents a brief study on active learning and then, through the analysis of the mechanical and mechatronics engineering courses pedagogical projects, proposes a solution for engineers training using the active learning methodology, the so called PBL. The author uses the knowledge obtained in achieving the first objective to propose the use of projects created around the considered vehicles as tools to the teaching/learning process. Through bibliographical researches and through comparison of reach and inclusion among, on one hand, the current curricular organization and, on the other hand, that one proposed using active learning methodology, the author shows that this last one fulfills satisfactorily the rigor of the engineer s technical formation. Through bibliographical researches and experimentation in class, he verifies that the new curricular organization can go further and also covers the competences not linked to the technical formation that the current organization is not able to cover satisfactorily, as social- environmental awareness and professional ethics, among others. Finally, the work indicates new paths to follow, both in the modeling of such vehicles, as in the study and use of the researched methodology.