Engineering Design Education - Core Competencies

In the past, it was very common for students to come to the university to study engineering with basic design and build skills acquired through hands-on experiences acquired through play with friends, work on farms, work on cars and general tinkering. Engineering students were predominantly white males and eager to dive into design projects that could call upon skills in spatial reasoning, problem solving, working with others, and more. Currently, students who enter the university to study engineering are more diverse in race, gender, and background. The pervasiveness of computers, computer gaming, and social networking has also shifted the competencies of most incoming students. Many incoming students do not have the background and skills required to succeed in the design of solutions to engineering problems. This paper suggests there is a need to identify and better understand the basic set of core competencies that, if possessed by the student, would assure their success in the engineering education environment as well as in industry upon graduation. This paper identifies industry lists and critiques and academic efforts to catalogue core competencies and gives an example of one core competency, after being identified as being weak and remediated, showed dramatically improved student performance.This proceeding was published in the Proceedings of the 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition, Paper No. AIAA 2012-1222, doi:10.2514/6.2012-1222. Posted with permission.</p

Student Experiences of Multidisciplinarity in the Undergraduate Geography Curriculum

This paper explores the student experience of multidisciplinarity within the undergraduate Geography curriculum. It considers the drivers that have underpinned this development before considering the findings of research into student experiences in two universities in the south of England. The results suggest that most students view this development positively and recognize a number of advantages that it brings, citing expanded opportunities for learning, working with people from other disciplines, expansion of perspectives and perceived benefits to employability. However, for a minority this development is more problematic. The research points here to issues with specialist knowledge and disciplinary pedagogies, social issues within the classroom and class organization and some reservations regarding groupwork. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations

To double a recipe : interdisciplinary teaching and learning of mathematical content knowledge in a home economics setting

This study examines if interdisciplinary teaching can be said to facilitate the learning and use of fractions by Swedish 12-year-old pupils. Home and Consumer Studies is well suited to interdisciplinary teaching, and young people can therefore find it interesting to study maths since the setting is relevant to them. Building on variation theory and a learning study, we examined pupils’ (n18) ability to double fractions greater than ½ when using a recipe. The general results show that what is to be learned benefits if it is presented in different ways, that teachers should not take pupils’ knowledge for granted, and mathematically that it is not necessary to divide something to be able to double it. We argue that the study shows that genuine problems based on pupils’ interest and life world can enhance motivation and, in turn, learning