The significance of teaching the basics of engineering education in middle- and high-schools is generally acknowledged by policy makers, teachers and researchers in the U.S.A. as well as a number of developed and developing countries. Nevertheless, engineering topics are rarely covered by precollege curriculums. A key contributing factor is that engineering hinges on the usage of technology to expose learners to fundamental concepts otherwise difficult to demonstrate. For example, learning the concepts of systems' design, optimization, and trade-offs can be a challenging task when teachers and students limited access to tools to practice their engineering knowledge. Thus, a deficiency of operational learning technologies for diverse precollege environments affects the availability of engineering learning experiences. The aim of this dissertation is to unveil the relationships between influential factors for the advancement of precollege engineering education. We proposed a framework for the development of curriculum and technology derived from analyzing design issues from the perspective of multiple entities encompassing a broad of stage holders including students, teachers and technology developers. Several influential factors are considered including human-computer interaction issues, the problem of a digitally divided population and the lack of engineering curriculum that reconciles precollege engineering education with state and national educational standards. The findings of this dissertation are based on quantitative and qualitative re- search performed during a four year span working with five local schools in the Tucson Unified School District.

Today’s labor market is teeming with software development jobs, and employeesare needed more than ever. With this statement, one would believe it is easy fora newly graduated student to start their career. However, according to severalstudies, there are specific areas where newly graduated Software Engineeringstudents struggle when beginning their first job. Currently, there is a displace-ment about what the school should focus on when teaching their students. Thiscauses various challenges to arise for newly graduated students when they areinitially starting their career. To address this issue, this study aims to iden-tify whether or not there exists a gap between the education provided by theuniversities, and what is expected from the industry. In accordance with this,the purpose is also the point out which areas might be challenging for newlygraduated students, and highlight how the school and industry can benefit fromthe results of this study.By conducting interviews with both newly graduated student with one to threeyears working experience or personnel responsible for hiring new employees atcompanies, this study will give an insight on which common areas newly grad-uates may struggle with. Although the result specifies several areas which arechallenging to newly graduated students. The greatest challenges which thenewly graduated graduated students faced were areas revolving around softskills. This was in accordance with the opinions of the recruiters. Insinuatingthat these areas are what the school should focus more on. Other differencesbetween the newly graduated interviewee’s opinions and the recruiters are alsohighlighted in the report Several subjects in school could improve its way ofteaching. Furthermore, there are possibilities for companies to better adjusttheir on-boarding of newly graduated. By addressing the challenges which newlygraduated face they can provide their new employees with a better understand-ing of how to properly work and function in the industry today.

<div> <div> <div> <p>In today’s global environment, agricultural students need the skills to thrive among a workforce made up of individuals with diverse experiences and perspectives. One promising way to prepare students is through the development of intercultural competence (IC). This thesis addresses several different methods of developing IC in undergraduate students. Chapter 2 addresses incorporation of intercultural interventions into a short-term study abroad program coupled with and a follow-up semester-long on-campus companion course to specifically target empathy development. The study found that overall students did not increase significantly on the IDI, but did show positive growth in empathy development throughout the semester. Chapter 3 describes differences in IC of students completing intercultural learning (ICL) assignments throughout a face-to-face introductory animal agriculture course compared with students not completing ICL assignments. The intervention group showed significant increase according to the IDI and increased on average 9.46 points. In addition, the intervention group increased significantly more than the control group (87.54 ± 2.09 vs. 94.76 ± 1.67) (p <0.004; df=1; f=13.23). </p> <p>Studies described in Chapter 4 build on those of methods followed a similar approach to the methods discussed in Chapter 3 but examine the impact of including reflection based ICL assignments using global animal agriculture as a medium. Notably, the course also occurred in an emergency remote learning setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from the study discussed in Chapter 4 showed that the intervention group increased significantly more than the control group (86.75 ± 2.11 vs. 95.29 ± 2.35; p < 0.004). In addition, the intervention group also showed positive results in developing the specific skill of empathy throughout the semester. </p> <p>The last study discussed in this thesis (Chapter 5) details the process of creating and validating a scale to specifically measure the competence levels in level of undergraduates’ essential skills in undergraduates. Cronbach’s alpha was reported for each skillset that was being evaluated and deemed acceptable.</p></div></div></div><div><div><div> <p>Each of the studies discussed was designed to fill gaps in the literature regarding skill development in animal science undergraduate students. The development of such skills, and IC in particular, is necessary for all students whether they pursue careers with as possible the opportunity to develop these skills, not just those who participate in international elements. As such, developing validate means to provide students opportunities to hone such skills is necessary to student future success. Toward this end, the studies described here seek to measure the efficacy embedding intercultural learning into undergraduate agricultural curriculum at providing such opportunities. </p> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Cultivating cross-disciplinary understanding across science and engineering instruction will be essential to preparing the next generation of scientists to prosper in an increasingly interdisciplinary STEM workforce. This study reports on the culmination of a project that has been aimed at addressing this challenge by investigating how science and engineering students use the first law of thermodynamics, a guiding principle of the crosscutting concept of energy and matter, to transfer across disciplinary boundaries. A qualitative interview study was undertaken in which chemistry-, engineering-, and physics-major students were recruited and tasked with addressing familiar and unfamiliar first law problems that incorporated the systems, language, and notation of each respective discipline. Guided by the dynamic transfer framework, data were analyzed via a general inductive approach to categorize the contextual resources, or target tools, students leveraged to address the provided problems. This analysis revealed three unique guiding epistemologies whose frequency and character of emergence signify field-specific approaches to transferring into an unfamiliar disciplinary context. Connections are drawn to highlight the capacity of the derived findings and developed methodology to support cross-disciplinary understanding in the classroom and in future transfer of learning research.</p>

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<p dir="ltr">The study investigates the effectiveness of productive failure learning using a contrasting-cases design of ill-structured problems followed by well-structured problems. Fifty-one future elementary school teachers, enrolled in an undergraduate physics course were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: a) ill-structured followed by well-structured problems (IS-WS), b) well-structured followed by well-structured problems (WS-WS), and c) ill-structured followed by ill-structured problems (IS-IS). The study hypothesized that the first condition with a contrasting-case design would outperform the non-contrasting-case design. After solving treatment problems in their respective conditions, all the participants took a post-test that comprised both ill-structured and well-structured problems. The one-way and two-way ANOVA results showed that while productive failure learning (IS-WS) outperformed WS-WS on both procedural and conceptual knowledge in the well-structured post-test, there was no significant difference between the three learning conditions in the ill-structured post-test. The findings indicated that structuring instruction lies on a continuum between highly structured and unstructured. For higher-level physics education, productive failure learning provided the optimum balance of discovery learning via ill-structured problems and guided instruction via well-structured problems to activate prior knowledge, draw attention to critical features of the canonical concept, and facilitate motivation and excitement within learners, resulting in effective learning.</p>

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:29:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5067.pdf: 2747208 bytes, checksum: c9d6a71cd2840bbbbbb38d4fda229305 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-15 / This study aims to report the results of a didactic and pedagogic research that uses a sequence of experimental and investigative work for the metric relations involving perimeter and area of a circle, a topic of extreme importance to basic education. This research, which was conducted in the footsteps of Didactic Engineering, occurred in two rooms of grade 8/9 years of Elementary School II of a public school in the state of São Paulo. The results indicate that the use of the proposed work can promote learning through lessons more enjoyable and participatory students. / O presente trabalho tem por objetivo relatar os resultados de uma investigação didático-pedagógica que utiliza uma sequência de atividades experimentais e investigativas, para trabalhar as relações métricas envolvendo perímetro e área do círculo, um tema de extrema importância para o ensino básico. Essa investigação, que foi conduzida seguindo os passos da Engenharia Didática, ocorreu em duas salas de 8ª série/9º ano do Ensino Fundamental II de uma escola pública no interior do Estado de São Paulo. Os resultados indicam que a utilização desta proposta de trabalho pode favorecer a aprendizagem por meio de aulas mais prazerosas e participativas pelos alunos.

<p>This research uses the composition practices of three experienced letterpress typesetters as a case study for the development of a methodology for studying human-technology interaction. This methodology tries to take seriously the implications that theories of materiality have for empirical research in writing and technology.</p> <p>Data was collected from three experienced typesetters, each of whom was observed setting type for two hours, then interviewed for 1 ½ to 2 hours, using observation footage to inform interview questions. Interview transcripts and observation footage were then coded for observable material intra-actions and the influences that characterized those actions and brought them into being.</p> <p>Data analysis produced six desiderata, or desires for design, that emerged as driving the composition process: 1) a desire to use the technology, 2) a desire for efficiency, 3) a desire to imitate/defer to historical practices, 4) a desire for letter-level correctness, 5) attention to aesthetics, and 6) a desire to communicate.</p>

<p></p><p>In this dissertation, I argue that there is value in treating students as implementors during processes of educational innovation. I lay the groundwork for this argument through a review of literature comparing best practices in the implementation of innovations in higher education with best practices from active learning, blended learning, and collaborative learning research. This is followed by a phenomenographic and narrative analysis: a deliberate combination of phenomenography and narrative analysis methods for the interpretation of data and representation of findings, leveraging the strengths of each approach to account for the other’s shortcomings. The result of this work is an outcome space containing a hierarchical framework typical of phenomenography describing the various ways in which the participating students experienced implementation within the context of a blended learning environment called <i>Freeform</i>. The presentation of this framework is followed by a series of constructed narratives which contextualize how the hierarchical framework may be evidenced in student experiences of implementation in higher education. </p> <p><br></p><p>The hierarchical framework contains six categories of description: Circumstantial Non-Adoptive, Circumstantial Adoptive, Preferential Non-Adoptive, Preferential Adoptive, Adaptive, and Transformative. Proceeding from Circumstantial Non-Adoptive and Circumstantial Adoptive to Transformative, each subsequent category of the model characterizes implementation experiences that are increasingly impacted by students’ own self-awareness of their personal learning needs and subsequent self-directed learning behavior. This represents a departure from previous implementation research in engineering education for a number of reasons. First, it demonstrates that there is value in considering students’ roles as implementors of educational innovations, rather than tacitly treating them as subjects to be implemented upon. Second, the use of the word “circumstantial” intentionally acknowledges that the external (environmental) factors that influence implementation can be distinct to individual implementors while remaining contextual in nature. Third, it demonstrates that the processes of implementation which students undergo can lead to concrete changes in learning behavior that extend beyond the scope of the implementation itself.</p><p><br></p><p>Narrative analysis is used to develop a series of narratives that embody the implementation experiences communicated by student participants. These narratives are constructed using disparate ideas, reflections, and tales from a variety of participants, emplotting representative characters within constructed stories in a way that retains the student perspective without adhering too closely to any individual participant’s reported experience. This approach serves two goals: to encourage readers to reflect on how the categories of the hierarchical framework can be demonstrated in students’ experiences, and to reinforce the fact that individual students can exhibit implementation experiences and behaviors that are characteristic of multiple categories of the framework simultaneously. It is important to remember that the categories included in the framework are not meant to characterize students themselves, but rather to characterize their interactions with specific pedagogical innovations. </p><p></p><p> </p><p><br></p><p>The study concludes by interpreting these results in light of literature on implementation and change, proposing new models and making suggestions to faculty to inform the future implementation of educational innovations. Faculty are encouraged to treat students as implementors, and to exercise best practices from implementation literature when employing educational innovations in the classroom. This includes adopting practices that inform, empower, and listen to students, intentionally employing strategies that allow students to exercise their own agency by understanding and utilizing innovations effectively. Prescribing specific innovations and forcing students to use them can be detrimental, but so can freely releasing innovations into the learning environment without preparing students in advance and scaffolding their resource-usage behaviors. Instructors and researchers alike are encouraged to consider implementation from a new perspective, students as implementors, and faculty as facilitators of change. </p><p><br></p>

<p>STEM education has been a topic of reform in education for many years and it has recently focused primarily on the education methodology called STEM integration. Universities and state departments of education have defined teacher education programs and STEM initiatives that explore the necessary ingredients for a curriculum using this methodology, but they do not provide explicit instructions for the design of the learning environment. The purpose of this study was to explore the question "What are the characteristics of high school learning environments that support integrated STEM instruction?" </p> <p>This qualitative study used a postpositive lens and multiple-case study framework to distill the experiences and evidence gathered from four STEM certified high schools in the state of Indiana. This distillation resulted in three universal themes common to each school which were: the allocation of universally accessible free space for STEM integration, the importance for mobility of resources and students, and the need for supportive technological resources. </p> <p>This study is applicable to both those who are educators working in STEM education and those researchers looking to understand the STEM integration paradigm or learning environment design. Educators can use this study to plan their own learning environments and researchers can use this study as a pilot to many other outlets in the topic of STEM integration. </p>