Engineering Commons^™

A Look At Vocational And Academic Student Backgrounds In Ability To Solve Practical Problems, Gareth Thomson, Mark Prince

Research Papers

While most students in the UK will enter engineering degrees with traditional academic qualifications, a significant proportion will come from backgrounds which use vocational based qualifications to gain entry to degree level study. Indicators show that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to be among those using vocational qualifications to gain entry to University and may not progress as well. This is often linked to difficulties in traditional academic elements of the degree such as mathematics where both the content and learning approaches are much less familiar to students with a vocational background. These academic skills are not …

Exploring The Development Of Engineering Design Creativity And The Role Of Spatial Skills In This Process, Clodagh Reid, Sheryl Sorby

Research Papers

This study aims to investigate the development of creativity in engineering education and how spatial skills relate to creativity of design solutions.

Undergraduate students in the first (n=86) and fourth/fifth year (n=48) of their engineering programme were invited to participate. Students completed four spatial tests to precisely measure visualisation skills. In a separate session, students were invited back to solve two engineering design tasks: a ping pong problem where they designed a ping pong ball launcher game to meet specified criteria and a rain catcher problem where they were tasked with developing as many ideas for capturing rainwater as a …

An Examination Of The Role Of Spatial Ability In The Process Of Problem Solving In Chemical Engineering, Sheryl Sorby, Gavin Duffy, Norman Loney

Articles

Engineers often communicate with one another through drawings or sketches and understanding technical information through graphical representations is a skill necessary for engineering practice. Well-developed spatial skills are known to be important to understanding technical drawings and are therefore, important to success in engineering. Unfortunately, of all cognitive processes, spatial skills show robust gender differences, favouring males, which could contribute to the underrepresentation of women in engineering. In this research, we administered a test of spatial cognition to students enrolled in a common 3rd year course in chemical engineering . In a second session, students were given a set of …

Exploring The Role Of Spatial Cognition In Problem Solving, Gavin Duffy, Sheryl Sorby, Steven Nozaki, Brian Bowe

Conference papers

While spatial aptitude is acknowledged as a key cognitive ability that accompanies success in STEM education, less is reported about the qualitative differences between weak and strong visualisers in how they approach and engage with assessments in STEM education. In this paper, we study one particular aspect of the STEM curriculum - solving convergent ‘word’ problems in mathematics - in an attempt to discern quantitative and qualitative differences between the approaches weak and strong visualisers adopt when solving these problems. The paper is a work-in-progress that started with a search for suitable convergent mathematics problems which were then presented to …