Can a Combination of Hands-on Experiments and Computers Facilitate Better Learning in Mechanics?

Microcomputer-Based Laboratories (MBL) have been successfully used to promote conceptual growth in mechanics understanding among preservice teachers and engineering students. In MBL laboratories students do real hands-on experiments where real-time display of the experimental results facilitates conceptual growth. Thus students can immediately compare their predictions with the outcome of an experiment, and students' alternative conceptions can thus successfully be addressed. We also report from a case where only MBL-technology was implemented, but the students were not asked to make predictions. As a result "misconceptions" were not confronted and conceptual change was not achieved among "weak" students

By hand and by computer – a video-ethnographic study of engineering students’ representational practices in a design project

In engineering education there has been a growing interest that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. However, students’ collaborative learning processes in design projects have, with a few exceptions, not been studied in earlier research. Most previous studies have been performed in artificial settings with individual students using verbal protocol analysis or through interviews.  The context of this study is a design project in the fifth semester of the PBL-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. The preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. Video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis were used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task. Complete six hours sessions of five groups were recorded using multiple video cameras (2 – 5 cameras per group). The different collaborative groups did not only produce and reach an agreement on a design proposal during the session – in their design practice they used, and produced, a wealth of tools and bodily-material resources for representational and modelling purposes. As an integral and seamless part of students’ interactional and representational work and the group’s collaborative thinking bodily resources such as “gestured drawings” and gestures, concrete materials such as 3D-foam and papers models, “low-tech” representations such as sketches and drawings by hand on paper and “high-tech” representations as CAD-drawings were used. These findings highlight the cognitive importance of tools and the use of bodily and material resources in students’ collaborative interactional work in a design setting. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a focus primarily on digital technologies, as is often the case in the recent drive towards “digital learning”, would be highly problematic

IS “DIGITAL EDUCATION” THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD? – OR IS, MAYBE, POSTDIGITAL EDUCATION WHAT IS NEEDED!

The use of “digital tools” have usually played an important role in the transformation to “emergency remote teaching” during the pandemic. However, even before the pandemic there has been a strong pressure that education should become more “digital”. Nevertheless, we see several problems associated with the present discourse related to “digitalisation” of education. 1) It often unclear what is meant with “digital education”, 2) very narrow view of “digital tools” too mainly be tools for information and communication neglecting other uses of digital technology, 3) unbalanced focus on “digital tools” there other tools are either neglected or seen as inherently inferior and “old-fashioned”, 4) conflation between “digital” and “distance”, 5) adherence to either a technological determinism or a pedagogical determinism (technology is a neutral tool). Engineering students’ courses of action have been videorecorded in design projects and in electronics labs at two universities. It can bee seen that students’ use a wealth of bodily-material resources that are an integral and seamless part of students’ interactions. They use bodily resources, concrete materials, “low-tech” inscriptions as well as “high-tech” (“digital”) inscription devices. Our results challenge that by hand – by computer and analogue tools – digital tools should be seen as dichotomies. Our empirical evidence suggests that students should be trained to not only be trained to work with “digital” tools but with a multitude of tools and resources. We, thus, advocate that a postdigital perspective should be taken in education where the digital makes up part of an integrated totality

Engineering Students’ Dynamic And Fluid Group Practices In A Collaborative Design Project

There is a growing interest in engineering education that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. Collaboration and collaborative learning imply a shared activity, a shared purpose, a joint problem-solving space, and mutual interdependence to achieve intended learning outcomes. The focus, in this study, is 1 Corresponding Author J Bernhard [email protected] on engineering students’ collaborative group practices. The context is a design project in the fifth semester of the problem-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. Students’ collaborative work in the preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. In our earlier studies video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis have been used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task on a momentmoment basis. In this paper we report from a one-hour period where a group of four engineering students do final designs in preparation for the status seminar. Using recorded multi-perspective videos, we have analysed students’ fine-grained patterns of social interaction within this group. We found that the interaction and collaboration was very dynamic and fluid. It was observed that students seamlessly switched from working individually to working collaboratively. In collaborative work students frequently changed constellations and would not only work as a whole group, but also would break into subgroups of two or three students to do some work. Our results point to the need to investigate group practices and individual and collaborative learning in design project groups and other collaborative learning environments in more detail and the results challenge a naïve individualcollaborative-binary

The Doctoral Symposium in Engineering Education Research at SEFI 2023

The 7th SEFI Doctoral Symposium in Engineering Education Research, held at the campus of Technological University Dublin on Sunday, September 10th, preceded the SEFI 2023 Annual Conference. In all, 37 Ph.D. researchers attended, which is a record number for this event. They came to share and further probe their Ph.D. research topics and plans of study and to strengthen and extend their professional networks. During this full and intense day, 27 established scholars provided the Ph.D. researchers with personal feedback and ideas regarding their research. The highlight, according to the Ph.D. student participants, was the warm and enthusiastic reception they received from the well-established seniors of the global engineering education research community. Although SEFI is a European organization, the Ph.D. researchers and senior advisers who attended travelled to Ireland for this event from Africa, Australia, and South and North America, and from all over Europe

Методы моделирования в экономических исследованиях

Материалы XVIII Междунар. науч.-техн. конф. студентов, аспирантов и молодых ученых, Гомель, 26–27 апр. 2018 г

Engineering Education Research: Reviewing Journal Manuscripts Fairly, Constructively, Effectively

Peer review is the mechanism for quality control in academic journals. When a manuscript is submitted to a journal, the editors invite other researchers – peers – to review it anonymously. The reviews should serve to support the journal editors in making decisions, and to support the authors in improving the manuscripts before publication. Therefore, reviews need to be fair and constructive. As reviewing can also take considerable effort, it is useful for the reviewer to consider how to do it effectively. Given the important role of peer review in a field, and the considerable effort it takes, it is valuable to jointly consider all these aspects of reviewing in a dialogue with reviewers, authors and editors. This paper presents the outcomes of such a dialogue with 49 participants in the field of engineering education research