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Author Queries & Comments:
Q1 : Please provide the missing affiliation details.
Response: - Maria M. Nascimento - University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Gustavo R. Alves - Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Maria
Luisa Sein-EchaluceUniversity of Zaragoza
Q2 : Please provide the missing city/state name for reference ‘OECD (2018)’.
Response: Asia Society/OECD (2018), Teaching for Global Competence in a Rapidly Changing World, OECD Publishing, Paris/Asia Society,
New York, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264289024-en.
Q3 : Please provide missing city for the reference "OECD 2018" references list entry.
Response: Asia Society/OECD (2018), Teaching for Global Competence in a Rapidly Changing World, OECD Publishing, Paris/Asia Society,
New York, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264289024-en.
Q4 : Please provide the missing book title and page range for reference ‘Quadrado (2018)’.
Response: Contributions to Higher Engineering Education Editors, Maria M. Nascimento, Gustavo R. Alves, Eva V. Morais, Editors, Springer
Singapore, 2018.
Q5 : Please provide the missing city/state name for reference ‘Trilling and Fadel (2009)’.
Response: Trilling B, Fadel C. 21st Century Skills.: Learning for Life in Our Times. John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, CA 2009
Q6 : Please provide missing city for the reference "Trilling and Fadel 2009" references list entry.
Response: Trilling B, Fadel C. 21st Century Skills.: Learning for Life in Our Times. John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, CA 2009
Maria M.Nascimento, Gustavo R.Alves, Maria LuisaSein-Echaluce[Q1]
Copyright Line: © 2019 SEFI
There is nothing I believe more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind. (Bill Nye, science educator and former mechanical engineer)
The OECD (2018) report on ‘Teaching for Global Competence in a Rapidly Changing World’ outlines the current challenge for education:
To be effective participants in this increasingly complex, diverse, and interdependent global economy, students will need to be highly literate and able to analyze situations and solve novel problems in creative ways. They will need to be knowledgeable about issues of global significance in areas such as engineering, business, science, history, politics, and the environment. Students also will need to be comfortable in unfamiliar settings and willing to learn from others. (10)
We think ‘student’ could be replaced by ‘engineering student’ or even by ‘engineer’. In a similar vein, Quadrado (2018) explains:
Engineering education is about facilitating the learning of scientific and technic knowledge, as well as learning the principles of the professional practice of engineering. Nowadays, such professional practice requires other skills to train a 21st century engineer, known as soft skills, such as teamwork, creativity, and ability to communicate, among others. (v)
Then, beyond the examination of the economic, cultural, and social factors, which influence the education of engineers in different higher education institutions, Trilling and Fadel (2009) had already enumerated the twenty-first century skills as: critical thinking and problem solving; creativity and innovation; collaboration, teamwork, and leadership; cross-cultural understanding;
communications, information, and media literacy; computing and ICT literacy; career and learning self-reliance. If we add the
Editorial
Recto running head : EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION Verso running head : EDITORIAL
specific content of each engineering domain, it may be challenging to educate engineering students.
The Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (SPEE, Portuguese acronym), founded in 2010, aims to promote engineering education through better teacher pedagogical formation and personal development; projects dissemination and participation;
collaboration between national and international experts and institutions, and the discussion of issues in the scope of engineering education. In order to fulfill these aims, SPEE started an international conference.
Aiming to disseminate the best results of CISPEE 2016, we made a call for papers to a special issue in the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE). The call was open also for other submissions. This issue is the result.
We found it a perfect match between dissemination of CISPEE 2016 papers and other authors giving their contribution to the (Re)Thinking of Higher Engineering Education. The papers represent manifold perspectives and complexities when (Re)Thinking Higher Engineering Education. Either involving research with students, teachers, documents, or other, all the papers gave a perspective of subjects that may be considered by researchers in Engineering Education when a contribution is requested. In this special issue 12 papers were accepted:
Catarino et al. analysed the answers of students of a Portuguese university and concluded that the ‘exploratory study pointed out for “problem solving” and “involving mathematics” categories and gave us hints for teaching mathematics courses in engineering degrees’.
Trevelyan et al. stated that an ‘important finding is that routine engineering performances by a majority of engineers, not associated with innovation or entrepreneurial activities, not only can be shown to create value, but also to protect accumulated value from inadvertent destruction’. So it ‘outlines the educational implications of these findings and proposes measures that engineering educators can adopt to improve the understanding of engineering graduates about engineering value creation’.
Concannon and his colleagues used a qualitative methodology to examine ‘six undergraduate pre-engineering majors’ self- regulatory behaviours, ability to self-regulate, self-efficacy beliefs, and intentions to persist. (…) Time management, prioritising, help-seeking behaviour, knowing professors’ expectations, and critical self-evaluation were essential behaviours for pre- engineering students’ persistence’.
Monteiro et al. rethought ‘engineering education analyzing the official mission of Portuguese HE institutions to identify current engineering education conceptions and the importance attached in them to the service to humanity view’. Their ‘results reinforce the need to build a new perspective that strengthens the role of engineering as a service to humanity, social justice and the common good’.
Vesikivi et al. presented ‘how teachers of Information Technology programs experienced the reform’ at their university.
(…) teacher teams that managed to overcome these challenges [time management, getting enough compensation for the work and possible loss of teacher autonomy] saw a variety of benefits in the new approach. Not only was team teaching seen as a means for providing students with the skills they need, but it also was discovered as a way to enhance the teacher's own professional development.
Kunioshi et al. analysed the learning styles and found that: ‘Science and engineering instruction in the Japanese educational context tends to reflect and reinforce a personalised transmission of knowledge style, while instruction in the American context tends to match and reinforce learning styles characterised by impersonal, inductive thinking’.
Silva and his colleagues looked
The first conference, CISPEE 2013, took place in Porto, Portugal, from 31 October to 1 November 2013, under the theme ‘Education in Engineering: Challenges for Innovation’.
Next, in 2016, University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (Vila Real, Portugal) organised CISPEE 2016 under the theme: ‘(Re)Thinking Higher Engineering Education’. The event brought together teachers and researchers from several engineering schools, institutions, and industry to share good practices that contributed to raise questions related to the improvement of the critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration and creativity and innovation in engineering higher education.
The latest edition of SPEE International Conference, CISPEE 2018, was organised by University of Aveiro, Portugal, from 27 June 2018 to 29 June 2018. The theme was ‘Changing Higher Education One Teacher at a Time’ and the focus excellence in engineering education (research and practice). So, SPEE and the Science and Engineering Education group at the University of Aveiro provided participants with an opportunity to be involved not only in Engineering Education themes, but they also participated in a series of open debates, discussions and decisions on the role of Higher Education Teaching (and Teacher's) in today's and future Societies.
into a multidisciplinary setting made up of three similar but independent product design and development masters courses taught at three higher education institutions, having the same assessment, syllabus, assignments, and outcomes. (…) Significant generalizable contributions for educating modern engineers, designers and business entrepreneurs are expected, instead of just teaching methods of engineering, design and entrepreneurship at the case universities.
Fourati-Jamoussi and her colleagues explored, ‘in a perception and reflective approach, how Sustainable Development (SD) can be understood as a driver for specific innovation attitudes in higher education engineering school’. Their work ‘suggests that SD can be a structural driver for innovation if it is integrated in a transdisciplinarity approach and not just as a discipline per se’.
Costa et al. work intended ‘to present an interdisciplinary project carried out in a School of Engineering’ and ‘its effects in the development of students’ skills’. Their results revealed ‘that the students involved in the project have been capable of identifying the specific skills that the project work had intended to address and develop’.
Rose et al. studied the emotions that are ‘present in all learning processes, including those in entrepreneurship education’. Using
‘courses on entrepreneurship for Engineering and Business Administration students at a German university’ their ‘findings suggest that reflection of students on emotional processes that involve the endurance of uncertainty contribute significantly to the achievement of learning outcomes and that (…) teachers can facilitate such processes’.
Santos et al. referred that ‘engineering needs a new learning taxonomy’, and they suggested a ‘taxonomy that addresses specific characteristics associated with the different levels of engineering’.
Finally, Nørgaard stated that the ‘development of employees’ skills and competences has become a key driver of economic growth in the developed world. (…) companies need to be able to identify precise areas where they have, or can build, distinctive competences’. So the aim of this paper was ‘to investigate how the FWBL [facilitated work-based learning] model worked in practice when implemented as a means for tailor-made continuing engineering education applied in a company setting’.
To conclude this special issue, we present some statistics in Tables 1 and 2. About half the submissions were accepted (52%), and of these 42% were a result of CISPEE 2016 and mainly from Portuguese authors. The remaining authors come from Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, and United States of America. This special issue participation confirms that the International conferences themes allow some of their participants to spread their studies, and they allow non-participants to add new outlooks to the theme. Therefore, we may say that this special issue accomplished its aim giving a contribution to the theme (Re)Thinking of Higher Engineering Education.
Number of papers submitted to this special issue.
Number of accepted papers by origin.
Gathering all the papers and taking them through the review process has taken a big effort from 2017 to 2019. We cordially thank all the authors and reviewers for their valuable work. Special thanks also to the past E JEE Editor-in-Chief Erik de Graaff for all his support and to the present Editor-in-Chief Kristina Edström who assisted us in finishing this special issue.
(Re)Thinking Higher Engineering Education is still in motion. Surely, there are challenges to cope with, people to be challenged, and a lot of work to be done. We hope that this special issue will engage more of the engineering stakeholders.
References
Table 1.
Accepted Rejected Total Papers submitted 12 (52%) 11 (48%) 23
Table 2.
From CISPEE 2016 Other contributions Total
Papers accepted 5 (42%) 7 (58%) 12
OECD. 2018. Teaching for Global Competence in a Rapidly Changing World. Asia Society[Q2].[Q3]
Quadrado, J. C. 2018. Preface to Contributions to Higher Engineering Education. Edited by Maria M. Nascimento, Gustavo R. Alves, and Eva V. Morais. Singapore: Springer[Q4].
Trilling, Bernie, and Charles Fadel. 2009. 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. John Wiley & Sons[Q5].[Q6]
