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There have been numerous research studies and recommendations as to what feedback should look like to improve student learning and the learning experience. These recommendations include being timely, fed forward, provided using different modes and sources and to support students to know how to best use the feedback they are given. The Faculty of Engineering and IT (FEIT) at The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is currently focusing on improving the quality, effectiveness and delivery of feedback provided to their students on their learning and demonstrated achievement in a variety of settings. This paper reports the first stage of this project where students were asked about their previous experience of receiving feedback, how they are able to use it and their preference as to the type and timing of the feedback they prefer. Students reported feedback was often was non-existent, extremely limited, nonspecific, or too late to be useful. They found feedback was most useful when it was specific, could be used for improvement and was not just focused on correction.

Engineering Education Research (EER) is a rapidly evolving and increasingly valued research field. This supports the number of PhD students to grow steadily, but unfortunately, they are often limited to a few within the large engineering faculty/department, having different backgrounds and interests. Additionally, the research methodologies needed by EER researchers are usually different from the classical technical engineering research (TER) methodologies. This translates into a need for specific training and opportunities to get to know each other better in order to promote international collaboration and develop a community of practice. SEFI and the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) both organized a summer/winter school for EER PhD students in 2022, attended by 34/14 participants respectively (note: attendance at the AAEE winter school is not limited to PhD students). We have designed a survey to elicit a mixture of background information (facts), perception data (opinions), and evaluative data (evaluation of the school). By using confirmatory factor analysis on half of the items and descriptive statistical analysis of all data, we aim to provide insights into the success factors of these schools. Both schools attracted a diverse group of EER-PhD students in different areas. The SEFI summer school excelled in building an inclusive and international research community, whereas the AAEE winter school was superior in gaining domain-specific knowledge needed for EER research. The results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the issues experienced by researchers who are beginning their career in EER and support organizers in designing international research schools.

The ability of Engineering graduates to function as successful professionals depends not only on technical disciplinary knowledge but also on a wide range of professional competencies. Students' reactions to the teaching and assessment of these competencies are often negative. An ongoing study by the authors has been exploring the nature of these reactions and in particular, the various factors that contribute to students' views on the teaching of professional competencies. A preliminary factor analysis showed that students' level of professional experience was a key factor in shaping variations in their views. In this paper, we explore this issue in more depth. For example, when asked on the pair of survey questions “do you agree or disagree that each competency type [professional / technical] should be a core component of your Engineering degree program”, the impact of increasing professional experience on the average response was only marginally greater for professional competencies than for technical competencies. In contrast to this, when asked the pair of questions “for each competency type [professional / technical] indicate whether it is easier to learn it at University or at work”, the analysis of the responses shows that as the level of experience increases, there is a small shift for technical competencies towards being taught at University, whereas for professional competencies, there is a significantly greater shift towards being taught in work environments. We explore these, and other related findings, and consider their implications for the design and delivery of engineering degree programs.

The professional formation of new graduates and their ability to perform well at the start of their career depends on the development of both technical skills and professional competencies. Whilst the latter aspects have become increasingly considered within engineering programs, they are often learnt within an academic context rather than a practice context. This is in contrast with research that argues that professional expertise should be learnt within the context in which it will be applied. This paper reports on an analysis of engineering student reflections on professional engagement activities over the duration of their university study. A text-based thematic analysis examines the link between different types of activities and professional competencies (using Engineers Australia Stage 1 Competencies), and the level of sophistication in the language using Blooms taxonomy. The thematic analysis provides strong evidence that different activity types result in students being more likely to reflect upon specific competencies. The deeper Bloom analysis showed that generally the activity types that have reflections skewed towards higher Bloom levels are those that involve project activities. We conclude that those activities that require student-driven exploration are the most likely to engage students in thinking about the nature of real-world engineering practice.

Copyright © 2019 Keith Willey and Tania Machet. Practising engineers are required to be independent learners, using their judgement and creativity to arrive at solutions to complex real-world problems. Research reports that these skills are currently underdeveloped in engineering students. This is not surprising given that most engineering students have undertaken mainly science and maths subjects in which they apply their mathematical knowledge to arrive at unique solutions. Conversely, in engineering practice, activities are rarely characterised by an ideal answer but rather are complex, requiring trade-offs and combining non-optimum solutions. Dealing with complex problems requires students to use judgement, subjectivity, and reasoning to make decisions instead of relying solely on the scientific evidence and facts. This challenges many students' feeling of competence and inhibits their learning motivation. In this paper, we report introducing student tutors to self-determination theory and a framework to provide a context and vocabulary to understand, reflect on and discuss learning when managing complexity to improve their students' learning and feelings of competence.

© 2017, © 2017 SEFI. Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of engineering academics’ perceptions of writing practices in the curriculum, and the extent to which these practices are visible to their students and to the academics. This paper draws on research from an ongoing study into the invisibility of writing practices in the engineering curriculum using a practice architectures lens. The paper uses examples from the sites of practice of two participants in the study to argue that prevailing practices in engineering education constrain more than enable the development and practice of writing in the engineering curriculum.

© Proceedings of the 46th SEFI Annual Conference 2018: Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Engineering Education Excellence. All rights reserved. Constructive Alignment has been widely shown to be a valuable approach to educational design, and yet there has been very limited exploration of the application of CA to the design of laboratory experiences. An analysis of existing student information on laboratory experiments shows that most student guides focus on describing the experimental activities to be carried out and often fail to provide clarity in the intended learning outcomes that are being targeted or connect these to assessment activities that allow students to assess their progress in achievement of those learning outcomes. We have argued that the application of CA to laboratory experiments will allow much more effective design. Future work in this area would focus on assessing the extent to which improved student learning outcomes can be achieved through the application of CA.

© 2018, © 2018 SEFI. Peer review has been the focus of an ongoing study at a series of recent annual conferences of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE). A further development of this study has been to explore the perspective/s of the authors of these conference papers and the impact that peer review can have on their development as researchers. This paper uses the identity-trajectory framework to illustrate relationships between peer review and academic identity construction for engineering education authors in the AAEE community. Participants’ responses illustrate how various aspects of responding to reviews and writing reviews for other authors, contribute to the development of the networking and intellectual strands of their academic identity as engineering education researchers. We suggest that members of the global engineering education community should be mindful of how they write their peer reviews of conference papers to ensure the opportunity to constructively contribute to their peers’ successful transition into this different research paradigm is not missed.

Copyright © 2019: Sarah Dart, Kim Blackmore, Keith Willey, Anne Gardner, Smitha Jose, Raj Sharma, Sloan Trad, Lesley Jolly:. Many engineering academics interested in quality teaching and learning dabble with educational research. Some go further leaving their technical research field behind to embark head-long into what for many is an initially bewildering and conceptually challenging domain. Often peers perceive this transition as a crime (giving up on real engineering) liable to be punished with reduced access to funding and institutional recognition for one's research. The Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) has been sponsoring a Winter School in Engineering Education Research Methods since 2011, to help engineering academics change their transition story from one of crime and punishment to success and reward. While helpful, this transition is not a simple matter of learning new techniques but of altering one's perspective and habits of thinking and behaviour. Many participants find this both challenging and at least initially, a lonely pursuit. In this paper, participants in the 2018 school ask the question "what enables and hinders the transition to educational research".

© 2016 Society for Research into Higher Education. The field of research (FoR) that an academic participates in is both a manifestation of, and a contributor to the development of their identity. When an academic changes that FoR the question then arises as to how they reconcile this change with their identity. This paper uses the identity-trajectory framework to analyse the discourse of 19 engineering academics in relation to their educational research. The findings reveal insights into the identity changes experienced in the transition from typical engineering academic to engineering education researcher. Participants’ responses illustrate how various aspects of their research activities contribute to the development of the networking and intellectual strands of their academic identity as engineering education researchers, and the effect of their university environment on this development. Conference participation was found to be an important contributor to progression of the intellectual and networking strands of identity-trajectory for researchers at all stages of development, although for different reasons.

Engineering practice requires engineers who have strong spoken and written communication skills, but the development of these skills, notably writing practices, is often invisible in the engineering curriculum, and rarely embedded. Decades of reviews of engineering education have identified the gap between the engineering curriculum and engineering practice, such as engineering graduates’ level of writing skills being inadequate for the workplace. This paper draws on research from a qualitative study which investigates the perspectives of engineering educators about writing practices in the engineering curriculum, utilizing the theory of practice architectures as a theoretical and methodological lens. Using examples from the case studies, we explore some constraints of the development of writing practices in the engineering curriculum. We then focus on case studies where the development of writing practices is enabled within a subject, across a sequence of subjects and throughout an engineering degree program, and identify elements that contribute to these practices. Our findings suggest that the development of writing practices can be integrated into engineering studies, but certain pre-conditions are required.

Engineering students are expected to graduate with high level written and oral communication, yet these expectations continue to fall short despite repeated calls by industry and by accrediting bodies such as Engineers Australia for engineering faculties to address this issue. One explanation for this ongoing challenge is that the prevailing practices of engineering education constrain rather than enable the development of writing practices in the engineering curriculum, in part because writing practices are viewed as ‘other’, and as not belonging to engineering knowledge. We argue that the reasons for the view of ‘otherness’ of writing practices in the engineering curriculum relate ontologically to the construction of engineering identities, and epistemologically to perspectives of engineering and writing as being different types of knowledge. Drawing on elements of identities of engineering educators and students, research on engineering knowledge and legitimation code theory, the authors explore these ideas through the lens of practice architectures theory. The analysis reveals that dominant practices in engineering education place writing practices outside what is seen to be engineering, although there are exceptions. The authors conclude that the practice architectures of the engineering curriculum which prefigure writing as being what engineers are not expected to be ‘good at’, and not as important as technical skills, are so much a part of the ‘unspoken narratives’ of engineering educators that writing practices are marginalised. When they become part of what engineers do, they are re-framed as ‘documentation’. This suggests that writing practices can be seen as intrinsic to engineering education and practice if or when they are re-framed as engineering practice.

Written communication is neither systematically developed nor practised in the engineering curriculum, despite expectations by universities and employers that engineering graduates will be proficient communicators, and despite interventions to develop students’ writing. The gap in the development of students’ written communication calls for an investigation into the continuing invisibility of writing practices in the engineering curriculum. The lens of practice architectures theory was used to explore how engineering academics view writing in their engineering subjects, and how they develop the writing practices of their students. Practice architectures theory sees practices as shaped by and shaping cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. A qualitative study examined engineering academics’ teaching practices and the extent to which writing is practised and developed within the subjects they teach. Results show the majority of engineering academics in this study view writing as separate from technical engineering knowledge. This impacts the prevailing teaching and assessment practices by not providing opportunities for writing to be practised and developed within the context of engineering education. Unless there is conscious inclusion of writing practices, prevailing teaching and assessment practices will continue to focus on the acquisition of propositional knowledge to the exclusion of the development of writing practices.

CONTEXT Despite their shortcomings formal examinations are often favoured as a means of achieving learning assurance as students undertake them on their own in a controlled environment. However, while formal exams may mostly ensure the integrity of a student’s submission the claim that they provide assurance of learning is less clear. Even if the questions in the exam validly assess the associated subject learning outcomes students are frequently able to pass (achieve 50%) with unsatisfactory, and perhaps even no capacity to demonstrate learning in some subject topic areas, even though they may be regarded as requisite. Furthermore, while undertaking these exams may highlight to students their learning deficiencies, there is often no opportunity for feed-forward assessments to motivate them to address these identified learning gaps. This paper reports on the impact of a threshold exam process on both student learning and assurance of that learning. PURPOSE What impact will threshold exams have on the way students behave and respond to the learning outcomes associated with a unit? APPROACH A large (>500 enrolments) multidisciplinary first year engineering subject was chosen for this study. Students were required to undertake a threshold exam in week 10 of a 13 week semester. The pass mark was set at 80%. Students who failed this threshold exam were invited to attend a workshop and sit a supplementary threshold exam at the end of the semester. This study used discussion forum posts, student surveys, tutorial discussions and analysis of exam results to investigate how student’s behaviour changed as a result of the threshold exam and the impact on their learning. RESULTS Despite many students having an objection to an 80% pass rate perceiving it as unfair, the threshold assessments had a significant impact on the way students approached their learning and engaged in their tutorials and other learning activities. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated the potential of a thr

© 2016 IEEE. This demonstration reports applying research in learning dispositions, orientations, agency, identity and collaborative learning to develop a suite of online software tools and resources. These tools have been specifically designed to assist educators to help students take advantage of the affordances of blended learning environments as well recognize, plan and manage the ongoing learning opportunities provided within their professional practice.

The increased adoption of blended learning designs such as flipped instruction by STEM academics has brought learning benefits for many students; however, it relies heavily on students being able to take much more responsibility for their own learning than in traditional lecture-based subjects (Reidsema et al 2017). Previous studies (Willey & Gardner 2015, 2014a, 2014b, Gardner et al. 2014, Willey et al. 2014) of students in two different engineering majors at the University of Technology Sydney have shown that students who perform poorly in flipped learning environments typically do not demonstrate the agency and self-efficacy necessary to take responsibility for their own learning and hence have difficulty achieving the cognitive changes expressed as learning outcomes in subjects. Poor self-efficacy, that is a competence belief about one’s capability to execute a particular action and achieve a particular goal, has been linked to attrition in previous research: Many different factors underpin attrition decisions in any one institution and for any one individual, for whom attrition usually results from the aggregation of diverse factors rather than 'the straw that broke the camel's back'. The only attrition triggers which span most universities and years of study are lack of clear reasons for being at university or academic self-efficacy (Willcoxson et al 2011)[6]. Crick and Goldspink (2014) refer to the link between learning dispositions, agency and identity and how students’ thinking about these concepts, such as self-efficacy, frames their future learning trajectories. While university programmes generally address knowledge generation, Crick et al (2015) argue that forming a learning identity is also “pedagogically significant”. The research of Thomas (2013) reports that ...students often experience stress, uncertainty and use ineffective learning strategies when they are not supported to understand how to direct their own learning... findings suggest that learn