Education Commons^™

Promoting Student Engagement Within A Practical Class Through The Use Of A Learning Portfolio, Niall Delaney, John A. Nolan

Conference papers

This paper looks at an exploratory case-study undertaken to try and investigate student engagement within a practical wood machining class.

Due to the nature of the course and the cohort of students, the current lecturer pedagogic practice has to be behaviourist, but from this a culture of expectancy has developed among the students. It was felt that something had to be done to revitalise student interest in the work they were doing and also give them the chance to address the perceived shortfall in their learning. There was potential for a lot of failures, but also much worse, there was …

A Model For Transforming Engineering Education Through Group Learning, Shannon Chance, Gavin Duffy, Brian Bowe, Mike Murphy, Tony Duggan

Conference papers

Electrical engineering educators at Technological University Dublin (DIT) have successfully implemented pedagogical change. They now use group-based, student-centered and inquiry-driven approaches to teach emerging engineers. The objective of this was to foster students’ personal as well as professional skills (i.e., teamwork, communication, self-directed learning, etc.). This paper explores how such change was achieved and provides graphic models that draw from prior phenomenological studies and incorporates aspects of Rogers’ (1962) product adoption curve and Lowe’s (2012) interpretations of it.

Peer Teaching: Taking The Recipe Out Of Food Analytical Chemistry, Julie Dunne

Conference papers

This presentation describes the implementation over several years of an alternative to ‘recipe-style’ laboratory practicals for a group of penultimate third year students studying applied chemistry as part of a four year BSc Nutraceuticals degree. The main objectives of the laboratory re-design are to better prepare students for the more independent final year research project which takes place in fourth year, and to integrate key employability skills into the curriculum. The approach retains many of the ‘tried and tested’ food chemistry experiments, but involves using a group peer-teaching methodology which aims to add value to the experience for the students. …