Search results for "Undergraduate engineering"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
University students’ learning approaches : An adaptation of the revised two-factor study process questionnaire to Norwegian
2020
This paper reports a Norwegian validation study of a widely used instrument to measure students’ approaches to learning, namely, Bigg’s revised two-factor study process questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F). Its cultural sensitivity and psychometry evaluations have provoked rigorous discussion among educators in different languages. A survey design was adopted involving 253 undergraduate engineering students across two universities. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to test six models hypothesized to reflect the factor structures of R-SPQ-2F and unidimensionality of its subscales. The results showed appropriate fits of a two-factor first-order model with 10 items measuring deep approach and 9 items…
Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the mental models deployed by undergraduate students in explaining thermally activated phenomena
2017
In this contribution we describe a research aimed at pointing out the quality of mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena/processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are initially analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the Physics Education Research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The inferred students’ mental models about the analyzed phenomena are categorized as practical, descriptive, or explanatory, based on an analysis of student responses to the questionnaire. A qualitative analysi…
Exploring Affordances of an Online Environment : A Case-Study of Electronics Engineering Undergraduate Students’ Activity in Mathematics
2019
Online learning environments are being used for teaching and learning of mathematics at university level. Exploiting the potential of digital technology, these Internet-based environments administer computer-generated homework, assistance and feedback for students. This article presents a case-study of a small group of undergraduate engineering students’ learning activity in mathematics in an online environment. The study focuses on students’ interactions with the online environment to make sense of the affordances of this environment. Utilizing multiple sources of data aid in analyzing the intentional and the operational aspects of students’ interactions with several resources in this envi…
The Boltzmann Probability as a Unifying Approach to Different Phenomena
2010
We discuss a pedagogical approach to the role of the Boltzmann probability in describing the temperature dependence of three simple experimental situations. The approach has been experimented in an introductory course on statistical mechanics for undergraduate engineering students at University of Palermo.