Engineering education research

Engineering education research exists in the interface where technological disciplines and the social and human sciences meet.

It works to improve the quality of engineering knowledge and skills through using the research methods of the social and human sciences to understand the goals, methods, and effects of engineering education.

This work is also embedded in the international engineering research community through networks such as the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), and the SEFI Engineering Ethics Special Interest Group.

The projects of on which a post-doctoral scholar would work are: Micro-ethics in team projectsEngineering ethics can be thought of as a multi-level domain, covering the impact of the engineer’s work on the wider public (macro-ethics), the behaviour of the engineer with respect to their employers or clients (meso-ethics), and the interpersonal interactions of the engineer with others in the context of their work (micro-ethics).

Implicit – and explicit – biases and discriminatory beliefs can impact on the work, careers, and lives of engineers and their colleagues, and on the effectiveness of their teams.

This project builds on prior work on the impact of gender on the experiences of students in team-based projects and aims to develop and evaluate an approach to sensitising students to the role of bias in team projects, and to equip them with skills to challenge discriminatory speech or behaviours in their interactions.

Emotions in Engineering Education Although engineering often imagines itself to be objective and non-emotional, emotions are central to the practice of engineers and to learning to become an engineer.

Engineering design has increasingly recognised that engineers design more effectively when they can empathise with those who will use or be affected by the systems, processes and objects which the engineer makes.

The study of ethics and pro-social behaviour over the last two decades has also increasingly recognised the importance of moral emotions in ethics judgements and decision making.

Engineering students experience, interest, joy, anger, frustration, and anxiety while guilt, and shame have been identified as characteristic of the practices of engineers.This project is a systematic review of the literature on emotions in engineering education which aims at identifying emerging themes, and approaches as well as clarifying gaps and new research agendas.Measuring the Impact of Interprofessional Project Learning One of the challenges in teaching professional skills in engineering education is that these skills are notoriously hard to evaluate.

Since both teachers and students often feel obliged to focus on what will be assessed, if these skills are not assessed in some way, they will often not be taught or learned. Combined with the lack of assessment, these skills are also often seen as implicit and hard to define.

As such, students who know they need to develop project management skills may not know, in practice, what they actually need to focus on to develop these skills.

The Interprofessional Project Management Questionnaire (IPMQ) is a self-assessment tool which allows students to evaluate their own self-efficacy regarding professional skills such as project planning, risk assessment, ethical sensitivity, team communication, and interprofessional competence. As a reflective tool this helps students clarify the skill areas they may want to focus on developing.

As a pre- post-class evaluation tool it can provide teachers with information as to the development of student self-efficacy beliefs during their course.