Maria Manuel Nascimento

Adding value to the learning process by online peer review activities: towards the elaboration of a methodology to promote critical thinking in future engineers

Considering the results of research on the benefits and difficulties of peer review, this paper describes how teaching faculty, interested in endorsing the acquisition of communication and critical thinking (CT) skills among engineering students, has been implementing a learning methodology throughout online peer review activities. While introducing a new methodology, it is important to weight the advantages found and the conditions that might have restrained the activity outcomes, thereby modulating its overall efficiency. Our results show that several factors are decisive for the success of the methodology: the use of specific and detailed orientation guidelines for CT skills, the students’ training on how to deliver a meaningful feedback, the opportunity to counter-argument, the selection of good assignments’ examples, and the constant teachers monitoring of the activity. Results also tackle other aspects of the methodology such as the thinking skills evaluation tools (grades and tests) that most suit our reality. An improved methodology is proposed taking in account the encountered limitations, thus offering the possibility to other interested institutions to use/test and/or improve it.

The Views of Engineering Students on Creativity

Creativity plays a growing role in education, from elementary school to higher education. Nowadays, both employers and universities develop research and are committed to the development of the twenty-first-century interpersonal, applied skills—creativity included—foreseen as fundamental to all professionals, engineers added. Generally, engineering degrees focus on the content of their scientific areas. In some higher education degrees, creativity still plays a small role. In order to reinforce the importance of creativity in the engineering degrees in a Portuguese northeastern university, it was pertinent to study the conceptions of engineering students about creativity. This study presents the conceptions of creativity of the first-year students of higher education, in the engineering area in two school years. The answers of 128 first-year students from two academic years (61 from 2014/15 and 67 from 2016/17) and four different degrees to the open question—“What is creativity?” were analyzed. It was a mixed study, qualitative to deepen students’ conceptions and quantitative to study some proportions differences and variables crossing. The results show low personal involvement even in the use of the first person plural in either school year, although the students’ most used sentence was “for me.” In both academic years, students’ definitions mentioned more the creation of the implicit category in the content analysis. The words “new” and “way” were common to all the word clouds produced, and creativity and innovation appear somehow connected. In general, proportion differences were not statistically significant and degree crossed with categories showed no dependency.

Performance assessment of open-access information about food safety

Hazard Analysis Control Critical Points (HACCP) is compulsory for all food business operators (FBO) in European Union, in order to guarantee food safety. Since small- and medium-sized FBO had less resources than large-sized FBO, the HACCP implementation is usually carried out by the owner or staff, mainly using online information from guidelines of national agencies responsible for food safety inspection and/or from guidelines published by associations of FBO. A specific checklist was developed to assess the information provided in 80 open access food safety manuals about HACCP and prerequisite programs. Performance of information was also assessed by Chi-squared test and logistic regression models. The overall information about food safety available on the manuals was considered as not satisfactory. Thus, the lack of information could compromise the compliance of food law. Although specific information about HACCP was considered as acceptable, the manuals do not explain how to carry out several steps such as foodstuff characterization, proper hazard identification or correct determination of critical control points. Information provided about prerequisite programs was not satisfactory mainly associated to (1) the lack of information about how to put each prerequisite in place and (2) the lack of information about the documents and records that each prerequisite should content. The results of this work indicate that FBO need to consult several and update manuals, as well other sources of information (i.e. expert consultation) to correctly implement a food safety program based on the HACCP methodology and guarantee the public health.

Web information for food operators: is it enough to comply with the food safety and public heath policy?

The work was supported by the strategic research project UID/CVT/00772/2013 of the Foundation for Science and Technology(FCT).

Breaking the habit: engineering students’ understanding of mathematical creativity

ABSTRACT In higher education, engineering students have to be prepared for their future jobs, with knowledge but also with several soft skills, among them creativity. In this paper, we present a study carried on with 128 engineering undergraduate students on their understanding of mathematical creativity. The students were in the first year of different engineering first degrees in a north-eastern Portuguese university and we analysed the content of their texts for the question ‘What do you understand by mathematical creativity?’. Data collection was done in the first semester of the academic years 2014/2015 and 2016/2017 in a Linear Algebra course. The results showed that ‘problem solving’ category had the majority of the references in 2014/2015, but not in the academic year 2016/2017 were ‘involving mathematics’ category had the majority. This exploratory study pointed out for ‘problem solving’ and ‘involving mathematics’ categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees.