Patricia B. Campbell

The effect of context on student engagement in engineering

The self-belief, motivation, tendency to procrastinate and learning styles of engineering students are discussed. It is proposed that engineering has developed an idiom and a learning approach that favours the dominant client, i.e. men, while simultaneously undermining the self-efficacy and motivation of women. Thematic coherence and teaching within a context that is familiar to students have been shown previously to be effective approaches for engaging students and are extended here to utilise the common experiences of all students to initiate the learning cycle. These approaches are combined with a template for teaching that uses the 5Es (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate) in order to render the fundamentals of engineering more accessible to all students. This methodology can be introduced by individual instructors, who will be rewarded by students who are more engaged, more motivated and more likely to give a higher rating to the instructor and the course.

The School Psychologist as Program Evaluator.

Abstract School psychologists are being required to evaluate educational programs. This paper discusses the role and responsibilities of a program evaluator, the programs of measurement, and the staff fear of evaluation. A model for program evaluation is then described with an illustrative example.

Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes: The DEEP Project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum

The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. The process involved dissecting each course into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus, editing the list of topics, associating prerequisites and successors to each topic and then using a genetic algorithm to produce clusters of topics. The new curriculum, which consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course, is quite different from the traditional curriculum.

Open Education: Students in Transition

Open education is fast becoming a cure-all for the problems of the elementary school. Unfortunately, few educators are studying carefully the outcomes of open-education programs. How do students fare when they leave innovative schools and are confronted with traditional education? Educators are concerned, and rightly so, primarily with the immediate outcomes of their programs. Wherever open-education programs exist in elementary schools, however, the issues of transition should be faced. The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the problems students had when they moved from open education to a more traditional junior high school program. The students who took part in this study constituted the seventh grade in a junior high school in central New York during the 1971-72 school year. The students had attended sixth grade in the seven public elementary schools, the parochial school, and a campus laboratory school. The junior high school, the public elementary schools, and the parochial school have graded, traditional programs. In 1970 the campus school initiated an innovative curriculum and an organizational structure conducive to openness. The overall program is called the Quest Program. In the Quest Program, the traditional graded organization of children

Language Arts Resources for the Gifted: an Annotated Bibliography

One of the major problems confronting elementary teachers is the lack of necessary time to thoroughly familiarize themselves with a great variety of resources. Teachers of classes for the gifted and talented especially are faced with the monumental task of acting as resource persons for individuals possessing an endless variety-of abilities, interests, and talents which are complex and advanced beyond the ordinary. Such students require special materials which are designed to meet their needs. Although many excellent materials are available, many teachers are bewildered by the sheer amount and have expressed a need for some sort c>f organized listing of currently available, teacher-tested resources, preferably with an evaluation from an experienced user.