Introductory engineering courses are either programme specific or expose students to engineering as a broad discipline by including materials from various engineering programmes. A common introductory engineering course that spans different engineering programmes raises challenges, including the high cost of resources as well as the lack of…

The use of audience response systems (ARSs) or "clickers" in higher education has increased over the recent years, predominantly owing to their ability to actively engage students, for promoting individual and group learning, and for providing instantaneous feedback to students and teachers. This paper describes how group-based ARS…

This paper reports on findings from a three-year study of project-based learning implemented in the first year of the Industrial Engineering and Management programme, at the University of Minho, Portugal. This particular model was inspired on project-led education (PLE), following Powell and Weenk's [2003. "Project-Led Engineering…

This paper presents the structure of an undergraduate course entitled "programming techniques and the use of specialised software in structural engineering" which is offered to the fifth (final) year students of the Civil Engineering Department of Aristotle University Thessaloniki in Greece. The aim of this course is to demonstrate the…

The twofold purpose of this study is to identify engineering students' perceptions of a problem-based learning environment and to analyse the influence of their personal "situation," general "interest" in engineering and "ability" to succeed on their perception, after they were exposed to PBL for the first time.…

This paper explores the effectiveness of using "structured examples in concert with prompting reflective questions" to address misconceptions held by mechanical engineering students about thermodynamic principles by employing pre-test and post-test design, a structured questionnaire, lecture room observation, and participants'…

In the Iranian higher education system, including engineering education, effective implementation of cooperative learning is difficult because classrooms are usually crowded and the students never had a formal group working background in their previous education. In order to achieve the benefits of cooperative learning in this condition, this…

The Threshold Concept Framework is used to initiate a dialogue on an empirically supported pedagogy that focuses on students' conceptual understanding required for solving application-based problems. The present paper uses a triangulation approach to identify the threshold concept in a third-year undergraduate civil engineering course on open…

In this paper, we present a teaching proposal used in an Introductory Physics course to civil engineering students from Porto's Engineering Institute/Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP). The proposal was born from the need to change students' perception and motivation for learning physics. It consists in the use of an…

Peer assessment (PA), as formative procedure, enhances learning by providing students with the opportunity to peer assess each other's work. However, since students exhibit different value systems (abilities, experiences, attitudes, cognitive styles, etc.) we propose a diagnostic procedure, which can be applied at the beginning of a course,…

Report writing is an important employability skill for Engineers and Technologists, and this case study describes how a Technology degree module took a novel approach to developing students' report writing skills. Students learned how to use a criterion-referenced critical evaluation framework for reports and other technological documents.…

The intent of the study presented in this paper is to show that the model of problem-based learning (PBL) can be made scalable by designing curriculum around a set of open-ended problems (OEPs). The detailed statistical analysis of the data collected to measure the effects of traditional and PBL instructions for three courses in Electronics and…

While importance of environmental ethics, as a component of sustainable development, in preparing engineers is widely acknowledged, little research has addressed chemical engineers' environmental concerns. This study aimed to address this void by exploring chemical engineering students' values regarding human-nature relationships. The…

This work examines an innovative and evolving approach to facilitating teamwork learning in a generic first-year mechanical engineering course. Principles of inclusive, student-active and democratic pedagogy were utilised to engage students on both the social and personal planes. Learner opportunities to facilitate, direct and lead the learning…

This paper presents a virtual lab for the contents of an Engineering project, for designing an agro-industrial building, which is also useful for a range of different transversal courses in Engineering sciences. The aims of this tool are to analyse the most important contents of a project-document (calculation, regulations, drawings and budgets),…