Developing knowledge intensive ideas in engineering education: the application of camp methodology

Background: Globalization, technological advancement, environmental problems, etc. challenge organizations not just to consider cost-effectiveness, but also to develop new ideas in order to build competitive advantages. Hence, methods to deliberately enhance creativity and facilitate its processes of development must also play a central role in engineering education. However, so far the engineering education literature provides little attention to the important discussion of how to develop knowledge intensive ideas based on creativity methods and concepts.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate how to design creative camps from which knowledge intensive ideas can unfold.

Design/method/sample: A framework on integration of creativity and knowledge intensity is first developed, and then tested through the planning, execution and evaluation of a specialized creativity camp with focus on supply chain management. Detailed documentation of the learning processes of the participating 49 engineering and business students is developed through repeated interviews during the process as well as a survey.

Results: The research illustrates the process of development of ideas, and how the participants through interdisciplinary collaboration, cognitive flexibility and joint ownership develop highly innovative and knowledge-intensive ideas, with direct relevance for the four companies whose problems they address.

Conclusions: The article demonstrates how the creativity camp methodology holds the potential of combining advanced academic knowledge and creativity, to produce knowledge intensive ideas, when the design is based on ideas of experiential learning as well as creativity principles. This makes the method a highly relevant learning approach for engineering students in the search for skills to both develop and implement innovative ideas.     

Arguing from Nature: The role of ‘nature’ in students’ argumentations on a socio-scientific issue

This paper explores how students invoked different conceptions of ‘nature’ in eight socio-scientific group discussions about human gene therapy. The paper illustrates and discusses how the students articulated nature and to what extent they elicited science factual content in the process. While the students in this study invoked nature at key places in a variety of dialectical contexts in the discussions, these invocations were often uncritical appeals and rarely involved science factual content. Even when an argument from nature was challenged, the author of that argument would often shift the sense of nature rather than elaborate upon the argumentation. It is argued that if students were properly introduced to the evaluative character of the term ‘nature’ it would not just be conducive to the quality of their argumentation, but also invite them to foreground science factual content at key places in their discussion.     

Frame of Reference Effects Following the Announcement of Exam Results

The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model by Marsh (e.g., 1990a) assumes two central information sources for the constitution of domain-specific academic self-concepts: (1) social comparisons (external frame of reference), in which students compare their own achievements with those of their classmates; and (2) intraindividual comparisons (internal frame of reference), in which students compare their own achievements in one subject with their achievements in other subjects. In path analyses, it has been found that the latter type of comparison leads to negative paths from achievement indicators in subject A to self-concept measures in subject B. To investigate the actual impact of achievement feedback and of the frames of reference on changes in self-concept variables, we analyzed math and German self-concepts immediately following the announcement of exam results in each subject. Participants were 258 7th- to 9th-graders. Path analyses using structural equation modeling supported the validity of the I/E model with respect to the impact of simultaneously given current exam results. In particular, German achievement had a negative impact on subsequent math self-concept. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.     

Paul Abraham: A Forgotten Scholar of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Paul Abraham, one of the Berlin Academys most experienced researchers, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. The fate of this Jewish scholar reveals much about the inner life of the Academy, and its treatment of Jewish staff, during the World War II. This paper describes his life, against a backdrop of war, revolution, and dictatorship, and in the context of one of the Academys most prestigious projects.     

Assessing a Promotional Strategy for Marketing Electronic Resources in the Library Environment

In the fall of 2015, two librarians at San Diego State University initiated a project to enhance the visibility of some of the library’s numerous electronic resources. Promotional materials were created to highlight some of the main features and functionality of seven specific databases to which the library subscribes. Although there are many factors of this project that warrant further research, the authors can definitively state that usage for six of the seven electronic resources featured in their promotional project did increase when they were advertised to a wider campus population via the library’s website.     

Children's Moral Motive Strength and Temperamental Inhibition Reduce Their Immoral Behavior in Real Moral Conflicts

This study is concerned with the prediction of interindividual differences in children's immoral behavior in real moral conflicts by moral motive strength (appropriate attribution of moral emotions to story characters), temperamental inhibition, and ego control. Children were tempted to cheat at age 6 when they felt unobserved, or to contend for a scarce resource in peer triads at age 7. Moral motive strength and inhibition, but not ego control, predicted low cheating and low nonverbal rivalry to a similar extent. Extreme group analyses of children low or high in both traits showed that cheating/noncheating could be predicted with a hit rate above 90%. Nonverbal rivalry in a group increased exponentially with the number of low-moral uninhibited children in the group, a finding replicated within the same sample. Discussion focuses on the influence of moral motive strength, temperamental inhibition, ego control, and their interaction on the reduction of immoral behavior.     

Social and Dimensional Comparisons in the Formation of German Students’ Language Self-Concepts

Abstract

This study extended the internal/external reference model to multiple languages including students’ language of instruction, first foreign language, and second foreign language. We examined whether social and dimensional comparisons play similar roles in the formation of students’ self-concept related to different languages and whether dimensional comparisons result in contrast or assimilation effects. All students had German as the language of instruction and English as the first foreign language. Students were divided into a subsample (N?=?487) learning French as a second foreign language and a subsample (N?=?481) learning Latin. Invariance tests demonstrated that the achievement–self-concept relations were similar across the subsamples, but interesting group differences became apparent when analyzing the French and Latin subsamples separately.     

Studies on educational reconstruction of chaos theory

The studies presented here comprise a project on the educational significance of chaos theory. Or to put it in a nutshell, we attempt to analyse critically whether the core ideas of chaos theory (as, for instance, limited predictability of chaotic systems despite deterministic laws governing them) are worth teaching and learning and furthermore we follow up the question of accessibility of these ideas for students. Subject matter structure clarification (i.e., construction of the mentioned key ideas) analyses of educational significance on the basis of widely accepted aims of teaching science, empirical studies on students' learning processes, and finally, development and evaluation of pilot instructional modules are closely interrelated. To put it into our terminology, the studies are embedded in a Model of Educational Reconstruction which may be seen as an approach to curriculum development that, on the one hand, takes into account the major insights provided by the constructivist view of the past two decades resting, on the other hand, on the tradition of German pedagogical theories on framing educational issues.