| 1. |
- Buckley, Jeffrey, 1992-, et al.
(author)
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The impact of country of schooling and gender on secondary school students' conceptions of and interest in becoming an engineer in Ireland, Kenya and Sweden
- 2023
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In: International Journal of STEM education. - : Springer Nature. - 2196-7822. ; 10:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- BackgroundGiven the disparities in gender representation, efforts are needed to make engineering education more inclusive and attractive to young people. It is important that those entering engineering education are making this decision with sufficient understanding of what it means to be an engineer. This study explored how lower secondary education students from Ireland (n = 435), Kenya (n = 436), and Sweden (n = 361) stereotyped engineers, and their interest in becoming an engineer was examined. The Draw an Engineer Test was used to achieve this, and ordinal and logistic regression analyses were conducted to compare the effects of students' genders and country of schooling on the genders and concepts of their drawn engineers, and on their interest in becoming an engineer in the future.ResultsA Sankey diagram illustrated significant complexity in the interaction between conceptions of engineering work and fields of engineering. Chi-square tests of association were used to examine the association between students depicting an engineer as either the same or a different gender to themselves and their interest in becoming an engineer. The results of these and the regression analyses indicate that young people's gender explains more variance in the gender of drawn engineers and the country they are studying in explains more variance in their conception of engineers. However, most variance was explained when both students' gender and country of study were considered together. Further, particularly for young females, drawing a female engineer as opposed to a male engineer was positively associated with increased interest in becoming an engineer.ConclusionsThere is a need to develop a greater understanding of engineering in young people to ensure they have sufficient information to make decisions regarding related educational pursuits. National-level attempts are needed to present accurate depictions of engineering, and effort needs to be invested in ensuring that young females can identify as engineers. Higher educational access needs to be considered in future work examining future career interests.
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| 2. |
- Doyle, Andrew, 1992-, et al.
(author)
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Subject(s) matter : a grounded theory of technology teachers’ conceptions of the purpose of teaching technology
- 2023
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In: International journal of technology and design education. - : Springer Nature. - 0957-7572 .- 1573-1804.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Technology education internationally has for some time struggled to achieve continuity between what is depicted in policy and curricular documents and the reality of day-to-day practices. With its focus often articulated through the nature of activity students are to engage with, technology teachers are recognised as having significant autonomy in the design and implementation of their practices. From this, it is important to understand teachers’ beliefs about technology education, as their conceptions of the subject will inform practice. As such, this study sought to investigate teachers’ conceptions of the purpose of teaching technology through reflection on their enacted practices. A constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed for the design of the study and analysis of data. According to our analysis, despite similarities between the nature of student activity that teachers designed and implemented, teachers represented the purpose of the subject in different ways. Three different conceptions of the purpose of teaching technology were identified; obtaining knowledge and skills for application, ability to act in a technological way, and ability to think in a technological way. Central to the three conceptions were contentions in the representations of what constituted subject matter knowledge in the subject, and the role that different application cases played in teaching technology. Without consideration and explicit articulation of the purposes for teaching technology, this lack of clarity and differences in rationale for teaching technology are likely to continue.
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| 3. |
- Larsson, Andreas, 1977-
(author)
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Metaphor in Mind : Programming Teachers' Knowledge and Beliefs in Action
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Programming has become an integral component of technology education around the world and is an important part of Swedish curriculum reform and classroom teaching. This thesis aims to explore relations between programming teachers' knowledge and beliefs about programming teaching and how it is enacted in their practice. In response, three studies were designed to investigate teachers' knowledge on three analytical levels: metaphorical expression, meaning, and understanding. The research relies heavily on triangulation and draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) for Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) as an analytical framework. Data consists of metaphorical expressions in four educational texts, three classroom observations and interviews, and eighteen online video clips. Metaphors were analysed by deploying the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), Metaphor Identification Guidelines for Gesture (MIG-G), and Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (PIMS), respectively. Study 1 revealed that programming metaphors (designated in uppercase) can be categorised as being either related to the function (e.g., PROGRAMMING IS BUILDING, or DATA IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT) of the computer, or the intention of the programmer (e.g., "jump between code lines", or "tell the system that..."). In addition to confirming that many of the metaphors in Study 1 are employed in classroom teaching, Study 2 shows the teachers use of metaphor in gestures when teaching programming. For example, a teacher might hold an "object" while speaking about a programming concept, and thereby expose the use of the metaphor A PROGRAMMING CONCEPT IS A PHYSICAL OBJECT. The study also found that the teachers frame their teaching in relation to building, instructing, mentoring, and problem solving. Study 3 explored spatiality of a teacher’s metaphorical expressions. Findings illuminated that the teacher’s utterances rarely display connections between programming concepts and spatiality. Overall, the thesis identifies key metaphors contained in texts, speech, and gestures in the programming classroom. The research also shows how the teachers enact teaching differently, thus implying salient connections between their knowledge, beliefs, and action.
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| 4. |
- Reid, Clodagh, et al.
(author)
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Using Adaptive Comparative Judgment to Holistically Assess Creativity of Design Solutions : A Comparison of First-Year Students and Educators' Judgments
- 2023
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In: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. - : American Society for Engineering Education.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This Complete Research paper investigates the holistic assessment of creativity in design solutions in engineering education. Design is a key element in contemporary engineering education, given the emphasis on its development through the ABET criteria. As such, design projects play a central role in many first-year engineering courses. Creativity is a vital component of design capability which can influence design performance; however, it is difficult to measure through traditional assessment rubrics and holistic assessment approaches may be more suitable to assess creativity of design solutions. One such holistic assessment approach is Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ). In this system, student designs are presented to judges in pairs, and they are asked to select the item of work that they deem to have demonstrated the greatest level of a specific criterion or set of criteria. Each judge is asked to make multiple judgements where the work they are presented with is adaptively paired in order to create a ranked order of all items in the sample. The use of this assessment approach in technology education has demonstrated high levels of reliability among judges (~0.9) irrespective of whether the judges are students or faculty. This research aimed to investigate the use of ACJ to holistically assess the creativity of first-year engineering students design solutions. The research also sought to explore the differences, if any, that would exist between the rank order produced by first-year engineering students and the faculty who regularly teach first-year students. Forty-six first-year engineering students and 23 faculty participated in this research. A separate ACJ session was carried out with each of these groups; however, both groups were asked to assess the same items of work. Participants were instructed to assess the creativity of 101 solutions to a design task, a “Ping Pong problem,” where undergraduate engineering students had been asked to design a ping pong ball launcher to meet specific criteria. In both ACJ sessions each item of work was included in at least 11 pairwise comparisons, with the maximum number of comparisons for a single item being 29 in the faculty ACJ session and 50 in the student ACJ session. The data from the ACJ sessions were analyzed to determine the reliability of using ACJ to assess creativity of design solutions in first-year engineering education, and to explore whether the rankings produced from the first-year engineering students ACJ session differed significantly from those of the faculty. The results indicate a reasonably high level of reliability in both sessions as measured by the Scale Separation Reliability (SSR) coefficient, SSRfaculty = 0.65 ± 0.02, SSRstudents = 0.71 ± 0.02. Further a strong correlation was observed between the ACJ ranks produced by the students and faculty both when considered in terms of the relative differences between items of work, r = .533, p < .001, and their absolute rank position, s = .553, p < .001. These findings indicate that ACJ is a promising tool for holistically assessing design solutions in engineering education. Additionally, given the strong correlation between ranks of students and faculty, ACJ could be used to include students in their own assessment to reduce the faculty grading burden or to develop a shared construct of capability which could increase the alignment of teaching and learning.
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| 5. |
- Seery, Niall, et al.
(author)
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Epistemological treatment of design in technology education
- 2023
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In: International journal of technology and design education. - : Springer Nature. - 0957-7572 .- 1573-1804. ; 33:4, s. 1547-1561
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Design as a construct has multiple meanings depending on context, function, and agenda. This paper proposes to set out functions of design as it manifests in the context of technological activity for the purposes of technology education. The importance of context and by association intention in technological and designerly activity is presented with reference to recent reforms of lower secondary school subjects in Ireland, in an attempt to demonstrate the complexity of design's treatment in technological activity. Critical to the success of designerly outcomes and outputs, is having a clear intention for the objectives of learning. This paper proposes a framework of articulations of design in the context of technological activity that attempts to position its utility with respect to the development of capability. Unpacking 'learning about design', 'learning by design' and 'learning to design' provides delineated intent that makes explicit learning, pedagogical, and evaluative decisions, reinforcing the position that it is what learners can do opposed to know, that is central to technological activity.
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