Habibah Norehan Haron

Confirming Self-Regulation Construct Items for Students Learning Statics

Learning and academic achievement are attributable to the complex cognitive phenomenon of self-regulation. There was a need to study self-regulation, a popular research area in education, on engineering students learning Statics. However, there was no specific instrument to measure self-regulation in fundamental engineering courses like Statics. Therefore, a modified self-regulated learning (SRL) instrument was used in the study that was carried out at four higher institutions in Malaysia, with a total of over 600 student participants. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) was modified for Statics and using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), nine new factors and respective items for self-regulation were confirmed.

Challenges in implementing engineering technology education in Malaysia

As Malaysia races against time to achieve Vision 2020 to be a developed nation, there is an urgent need for highly-skilled human resources to fulfill the requirements of the industry. This calls for an expansion of the engineering technology program to increase the number of technical graduates. However, various challenges are faced by the institutions in the implementation of the Engineering Technology programs, which have significant negative impact on the nation in general and in particular the graduates from the programs. Data was collected from a brainstorming session between six organizations involved in providing engineering technology education in Malaysia and the UniversitiTeknologi Malaysia (UTM) and a convention on Engineering Technology Future in Malaysia. These challenges are categorized into four and discussed in this paper.