An engineering economy concept inventory

Abstract

There has been considerable recent emphasis on valid assessment of learning in engineering education. When new teaching pedagogies are introduced, it can be very challenging to demonstrate increases in learning of course concepts. While there are a number of accepted concept inventories available for some engineering topics (statics and dynamics, heat and energy, signals and systems, and statistics), reliable and valid tools for assessing learning are not readily available for many curriculum areas, including engineering economy. This paper discusses the reliability and validity of the Engineering Economy Concept Inventory (EECI) that can be used to assess learning in any introductory engineering economy course. Development of the EECI began in 2009 for use in assessing the effectiveness of model-eliciting activities in the classroom and has since been revised and reformulated a number of times. In the fall of 2018, the EECI was administered at multiple institutions for further evaluation of its validity and results from these groups of students are presented. The paper concludes with remarks regarding the reliability and validity of the instrument and recommendations for its use as a tool to assess knowledge in engineering economy.     

Australian enrolment trends in technology and engineering: putting the T and E back into school STEM

There has been much political and educational focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Australian schools in recent years and while there has been significant research examining science and mathematics enrolments in senior high school, little is known about the corresponding trends in Technologies and engineering. Understanding these subjects is essential for educators and policy-makers alike if Australians are to embrace the challenges of an innovation economy. We have collected raw enrolment data from each of the Australian state and territory education departments from 1992 to 2014 and analysed this across five Technology and Engineering subject areas. We also consider some of the relationships between these subject areas and other areas of the STEM equation. The results of these analyses are discussed in terms of absolute enrolments, participation rates and sex balance. We have found that the total number of students in Year 12 increased year on year and that this growth is echoed, to a lesser extent, in the participation rates for design technology, food technology and engineering. Digital Technologies however, grew rapidly until 2000, after which time it has been in steady decline. We identify that while the trends mostly show growth, there is a concerning male bias to many of these subject areas. We suggest that the broadening of the upper high school curriculum, confusion surrounding vocational training enrolments, and gamesmanship of the university entrance system, may be contributing to the limited growth observed. Finally, we identify a number of important areas for further research in this key learning area.     

Introduction of CAA into a Mathematics Course for Technology Students to Address a Change in Curriculum Requirements

The mathematical requirements for engineering, science and technology students has been debated for many years and concern has been expressed about the mathematical preparedness of students entering higher education. This paper considers a mathematics course that has been specifically designed to address some of these issues for technology education students. It briefly chronicles the changes that have taken place over its lifetime and evaluates the introduction of Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) into a course already being delivered using Computer Aided Learning (CAL). Benefits of CAA can be categorised into four main areas. 1. Educational – achieved by setting short, topic related, assessments, each of which has to be passed, thereby increasing curriculum coverage. 2. Students – by allowing them to complete assessments at their own pace removing the stress of the final examination. 3. Financial – increased income to the institution, by broadening access to the course. Improved retention rate due to self-paced learning. 4. Time – staff no longer required to set and mark exams. Most students preferred this method of assessment to traditional exams, because it increased confidence and reduced stress levels. Self-paced working, however, resulted in a minority of students not completing the tests by the deadline. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Integrating innovation skills in an introductory engineering design-build course

Modern engineering curricula have started to emphasize design, mostly in the form of design-build experiences. Apart from instilling important problem-solving skills, such pedagogical frameworks address the critical social skill aspects of engineering education due to their team-based, project-based nature. However, it is required of the twenty-first century engineer to be not only technically competent and socially and culturally aware, but also innovative and entrepreneurial. This paper discusses a reformulated first-year engineering course at the University of Pretoria, which was adopted 6 years ago to better address the required innovation skills of engineering students. This design-build-innovate course employs a unique creative problem-solving strategy in designing and building solutions to set technological problems. The students further investigate the provisional patenting of their design concepts. Mini business plans are developed and the students participate in a university- and in a national innovation competition. This introductory engineering course has been successful as measured by overwhelmingly positive student feedback, several provisional patents, and a number of small start-up companies that emanated from the students’ work.     

Engineering and technology students’ perceptions of courses

As cultural, social, political and economic changes take place, the secondary or high school curriculum should reflect and respond to changing needs and aspirations of students. Technology Education has been proactive in this arena as it has transformed over the decades to meet ever-changing societal needs. The most recent change to the discipline has been to add engineering and, as a result, adopting a new name and curriculum-Engineering and Technology Education. The added component and name change in Technology Education is causing discussions about what the new direction means, what professional preparation changes will be incurred, and what work graduating students will be prepared to do. In light of these changes, this study investigated perceptions of high school students in the United States of America about engineering and technology courses they take. To investigate whether students’ perceptions are in accord with current changes in Engineering and Technology Education, 316 students enrolled in engineering and technology courses in Georgia schools that have an affiliation with the Georgia Engineering and Technology Education Association (GETEA) were surveyed. According to data analyses, students’ perceptions can be divided into two factors. Educational Value of Course (factor 1) was extracted from statements measuring the degree to which the courses prepare students for employment and provide them with information regarding future employment. Personal Relevance of Course (factor 2) was derived from statements measuring students’ perceptions about links between engineering and technology education and their personal lives. Such findings suggest these students valued their engineering and technology courses, planned to continue their education, made good grades, and had varied types of career expectations for jobs such as design engineers and architects.     

Influence of national and engineering culture on team role selection

Engineering education is an emerging field of research. Due to its applied nature, recent theoretical developments have been followed by empirical evidence and interdisciplinary research. The present study attempted to describe the team roles assumed by members of project teams composed of young engineering students. The study was conducted in Pakistan by using the Belbin Team Role Self Perception Inventory. It was found that young Pakistani engineers assumed the roles of implementer, coordinator, shaper and team worker. This study attempts to understand role choices through the framework of national cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede and engineering education culture offered by Godfrey and Parker. The study strongly recommends that engineering curriculum should incorporate activities which could foster creativity among engineers. Moreover, engineering students should be motivated to innovate through collaboration in a problem and project based environment, which is seriously lacking in engineering education of Pakistan.     

Engineering attitudes: an investigation of the effect of literature on student attitudes toward engineering

The growth of STEM career occupations is outpacing the college enrollment of STEM students in the United States. There have been many research projects investigating this issue. There has not however been a study which investigated the impact non-fiction literature has on student interest in studying STEM (specifically engineering) content. The purpose of this study was to investigate the change of student attitudes toward engineering after reading literature involving non-fiction engineering centric narratives. The study used a modified version of the PATT (Pupils Attitudes Towards Technology) called the TEAS (Technology and Engineering Attitudes Scale) to measure student attitude change. The students were high-school aged students in the United States (ages: 15–17) who were enrolled in an English Literature course. The students completed the TEAS before and after reading and studying two engineering and technology centric non-fiction books (The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind and October Sky). The data revealed that student attitude after reading and studying the two books did not statistically change.     

浅谈“教学结合职业规划”模式下服装设计教学的改革方向

二十世纪八十年代以来,中国的经济从计划经济体制逐渐转变到了市场经济体制,并取得了巨大的发展和成绩。在这个过程中,服装行业也是转变和发展最彻底的一个行业,可服装设计教学作为教育行业的一部分并没有因此发生较大的改变,所以服装设计教学在中国很多高校里实际已经和服装市场脱节,甚至出现了很多没有任何企业实践经验的教授、教师却在天天进行实践性教学环节,并且教学目标是培养学生去服装企业里做一个优秀的设计师这么尴尬的现状。所以本文主要论述在新时代背景下,服装设计教学如何走出这种困境,顺应时代和市场的发展而进行改革、调整而发展的方向和思路。     

Technical Note–Design and Analysis of Tent Cash Flow Models for Engineering Economy Lectures

Engineering economy students are typically intimidated by arithmetic gradient series cash flows. Hence, it is beneficial to develop creative ways to make the material interesting and less formidable. This paper presents an innovative method of introducing students to the design and analysis of arithmetic gradient series cash flows in engineering economy courses. Several profiles of arithmetic gradient series cash flows are presented along with techniques of deriving closed form equations for their net present values. A “General Tent Equation” that can be used to solve various arithmetic gradient series cash flows is developed. A numerical example is used to show its implementation and usefulness.     

Mechanical engineering and issues on teaching mechanical engineering design in Turkey

Students with relatively low affinity and/or weak ability for science and mathematics have been presently acknowledged into Mechanical Engineering (ME) departments around the world. This has resulted in apparent lowering of fully competent graduate engineers, due to insufficient comprehension and its concomitant cognitive issues. Now, the complexity and the demand of ME education have been extremely unbalanced with recruited students. This conflict between the education process and less knowledgeable students has been adequately acknowledged, but remedies for this global issue are not yet available. This is no longer sustainable. The paper gives insight into (individual and combined) plausible reasons for fewer fully competent graduate engineers, taking the specific case study in Turkey. It proposes a generic approach, which can be extended to courses of any university/degree subject. Findings on student learning are provided using a hierarchical decomposition. A proposed remedy for this issue has been thoroughly evaluated, and accountability measures, qualitative data and a survey has been conducted for the ME design course taught in Turkey. The findings indicate that the new recruits are not fully to blame for the conflict, because there have also been other reasons for the issues within teaching. It identified multiple instances of the reasons such as unnecessary complexity of textbooks, unsolved contradictions even between the technical component design standards and etc. If these are considered by educators, this will help to reduce the perceived degree of teaching difficulty, and have a positive effect on the quality of graduates. It may even assist in attracting higher ability students into ME.     

MACHINE TOOL PRODUCTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES by M. M. Huq and C. C. Prendergast,Scottish Academic Press,Edinburgh, Scotland, 1983, xlll + 132 pp.

Engineering economics courses and textbooks have typically acknowledged the existence of the role of risk in economic decision making, but often in a peripheral way. The approach has been to suggest the existence of risk and uncertainty in engineering decisions, and to quantify that risk. The world of financial decision making includes many more powerful tools and techniques for risk management, rather than just risk measurement. The techniques of risk management include diversification, hedging, insuring, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), futures contracts, options, and other investments. These portfolio tools are useful to engineering decision making, and the engineering economics community would be well served to include these topics in engineering economics undergraduate education.     

Toward The Improvement Of The Traditional Course In Engineering Economy Through Unification As Applied Decision Theory

A general discussion of the undergraduate course in Engineering Economy is presented for comment and evaluation. The discussion is aimed at unification and cohesion of engineering decision methods by means of a basic structure of applied decision theory centered in a simplifying abstraction of teleological behavior.

The traditional course covers concepts and methods that are useful to the improvement of the efficiency with which engineering decisions are made, but textbooks lack organization, cohesion, and rigor.

Suggested elements of the unifying structure are (1) the formulation of specific objectives from value potential, (2) the measurement of value, (3) the specification of available choices, (4) the prediction of outcomes, (5) the estimation of criterion functions, and (6) optimization processes.

Engineering Economy is traditionally taught as a bagful of disorganized tools. As a student of Civil Engineering the author went through it twice, once as an undergraduate and once as a graduate (at different institutions and from very able professors) without grasping the basic concepts that should have been learned. Many methods, definitions, and problems were well embedded in the gray matter, but the collection resembled a child's tool box where things are packed carelessly without regard for saw teeth, plane and chisel blades, or probing fingers. There is little orderly arrangement that might make the tools more easily found and more effectively used.

More recently the author has been faced with the task of teaching the course to senior engineering students. In the meantime, between second and third rounds, two graduate degrees were acquired, and a lot of time was spent studying operations research and economics. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the bag of tools has gained a startingly new significance. Everything has begun to slip neatly into a basic framework, and this produces a large question mark. Why are the textbooks on the subject written so as to obscure the unifying principles that are so basic to decision processes and all goal-oriented behavior?

In the author’s opinion, the objective of the course is simply to study the improvement of the efficiency of teleological or goal-seeking behavior in the engineering context. There is room for vast improvement. The following discussion is a recommended step in that direction.     

工科类高职院校《化工原理》教学改革与实践

"化工原理"课程是工科类高职院校学生必修的一门基础技术专业课,针对高职院校的教学模式和培养目标及本课程的教学特点和学生基础普遍较薄弱的特点,从教学内容、教学手段、课程体系等方面进行改革。打破学科教育的模式、理论课程与实践课程的界限,加大实践教学比例,突出实践技能的培养,建立以职业能力培养为根本的课程体系。     

Attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in a project-based learning (PjBL) environment

Many scholars claimed the integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is beneficial to the national economy and teachers and institutes have been working to develop integrated education programs. This study examined a project-based learning (PjBL) activity that integrated STEM using survey and interview methods. The participants were 30 freshmen with engineering related backgrounds from five institutes of technology in Taiwan. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to examine student attitudes towards STEM before and after the PjBL activity. The results of the survey showed that students’ attitudes to the subject of engineering changed significantly. Most of the students recognized the importance of STEM in the science and engineering disciplines; they mentioned in interview that the possession of professional science knowledge is useful to their future career and that technology may improve our lives and society, making the world a more convenient and efficient place. In conclusion, combining PjBL with STEM can increase effectiveness, generate meaningful learning and influence student attitudes in future career pursuit. Students are positive towards combining PjBL with STEM.     

Strengthening the link between theory and practice in teaching design engineering: an empirical study on a new approach

In 2007, the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology introduced a new bachelor program. Based on theories of learning and instruction three design principles were used to develop an approach that aims to make it easier for students to bridge the gap between theoretical design engineering courses and practical design projects. To investigate whether the new program is successful in this respect, we selected a representative combination of one course and one design project, analysed grades, sent out questionnaires and interviewed teaching staff. The unique change of all three course years at once, as opposed to sequential introduction, allowed us to establish a control group and obtain precise results. By repeating our studies 1 year later, we further enhanced the reliability of our findings. We conclude that our approach indeed strengthens the link between theory and practice, and have reason to be positive about the research method adopted. Furthermore, we identified several barriers that must be overcome for such an approach to become successful, and can now give additional recommendations for course and/or program revisions in teaching design engineering at academic level.     

Evaluating students with online testing modules in engineering economics: A comparision of student performance with online testing and with traditional assessments

Abstract

Engineering economics courses often require students to take time-constrained, in-class exams in which they solve problems by hand, possibly referring to interest rate tables. Many students rely on partial credit to successfully pass exams. Outside of the classroom, professionals rely on computers to solve engineering economics problems, which raises the question of whether engineering economics courses are correctly assessing student performance. This article describes the study of a large engineering economics class using a non-conventional testing method. Student performance was evaluated using online testing modules with a stringent passing criterion, and the tests could be taken multiple times. The questions for each testing attempt were pulled from a database so that students received a new question every time. We compare the performance of students who were assessed using traditional methods with the performance of students assessed with these online testing modules. Our analysis shows that, overall, students who were assessed using the online testing modules earned better grades than students who were assessed via traditional methods. The analysis also discusses several benefits and drawbacks to using online assessments compared with traditional methods. The online assessment method could be useful in large engineering courses that are formula-based.     

An Approach to the Capital Budgeting Problem with Multiple Objectives

This paper describes a course in Engineering Economy which has been taught at Bradford for twenty years. It employs a variety of teaching methods to meet the preferred learning styles of students with different personality profiles and rt enables them to develop by passing through all four quadrants of the Experiential Learning Cycle. To facilitate this process, a novel business game has been invented which allows the Net Present Value of a project to be calculated quickly. Working as teams, students can thereby appraise the economic merits of a capital project as it proceeds through the various stages of its life cycle. The derivation of this model is provided herein with a few examples of the memoranda which enable the game to develop in a realistic way and by applying sequential decisions.     

PERSPECTIVE: Ten Years Of Experience Teaching A Multi‐Disciplinary Product Development Course⋆⋆

Integrated Design for Marketability and Manufacturing (IDMM at Stanford) is an Integrated Product Development course (IPD at Michigan) that is distinguished by hands‐on manufacture of customer‐ready prototypes executed by cross‐disciplinary teams of students (MBAs and graduate Engineering and Design students) in a simulated economic competition against benchmark products and against each other. The course design is such that teams can succeed only by performing well in each of the marketing, manufacturing, engineering, and design dimensions. Student failure modes include adopting the wrong product strategy, failure to execute a sound strategy of producing a product that meets market needs, failure to drive costs down, poor product positioning and/or communication, poor forecasting and inventory management, and poor team dynamics. Instructors adopting this course model will face challenges that derive from its definitively cross‐functional nature. The course involves faculty from Business, Engineering, and Design in a world where teaching load, compensation and infrastructural support is most often tallied on a unit‐specific basis. The course requires faculty with broad interests in a world in which narrow academic depth is often more highly valued. Other challenges the course presents include maintaining a sense of fairness in the final product competition, so that students can move beyond the anger of a potential failure to learn from their experience. Also, in its current manifestations on the Stanford and Michigan campuses the course requires expensive general‐purpose machine tools and instruction for students to build fully functional (customer‐ready) product prototypes. We provide our current resolutions to these challenges, and the rewards for making the effort. In the end, the course's survivability can be traced to the benefits it provides to all stakeholders: students, faculty, and administrators. These benefits include a course that integrates disciplines in a way that students believe will increase their integrative skills and marketability, a course that faculty can embrace as a vehicle for their own development in teaching and research, and that administrators find sufficiently novel and engaging to attract the attention of outside constituencies and the press. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

A unique program for integrating health,safety, environment and social aspects into undergraduate chemical engineering education

Over the last fifteen years Delft University of Technology has developed a unique educational program in its undergraduate curriculum. In this program health, safety, environmental and social aspects of chemical engineering are studied explicitly in separate courses while being integrated into the whole of educational and research activities. The program's activities include a required (“dedicated”) third year course, Chemical Risk Management, which covers environment as well as safety. There is also a required first year course, Chemistry and Society/Industrial Orientation, which studies how industries and government react to environmental and safety problems. Another required activity is the Safety Report, which fourth year and graduate students must write and have accepted in order to be allowed to carry out laboratory work. All these activities are closely related to and coordinated with one other. The program, which has been followed by more than two thousand students over the last fifteen years, requires extensive cooperation with industry.     

What preconceptions and attitudes about engineering are prevalent amongst upper secondary school pupils? An international study

In the Netherlands, as well as in many other countries, there is an increasing interest in implementing education about engineering as a part of general education at the upper secondary school level. In order to know what pupils at that level think about engineering, a study has been done to investigate their attitude towards and their concept of engineering. This study was done not only in the Netherlands but also in 39 other countries. In the preparation of the study, pupils were asked to draw concept maps of what they thought engineering was about. In the quantitative main part of the study, pupils were asked to respond to 33 Likert-type attitude items and 32 concept-items of the same type. A factor analysis was done in order to reveal the dimensions in the pupils’ attitude and concept. In contrast to studies carried out amongst students in lower secondary school levels, a fairly clear concept about engineering was found. The gender differences relating to engineering, found in lower secondary education, were not found in upper secondary education. The prevalent attitude of students towards engineering indicated a fairly positive image of engineering.