Navigating Transitions: Challenges for Engineering Students

As college students enter engineering, they face challenges when they navigate across various transitions. These challenges impact whether a student can successfully adapt to the rigorous curricular requirements of an engineering degree and to the norms and expectations that are particular to engineering. This article focuses on the transitions between disciplinary literacies, primarily addressing how ideas are communicated and which types of semiotic representations are valued, required, and ignored by the different cultures that come into play both prior and during a student’s engineering education. Specifically, it addresses navigation:

• Across secondary to postsecondary institutional expectations, contrasting common curricular experiences of secondary students and postsecondary curricular expectations.

• Between and within disciplines (including mathematics and science), which often have different ways of communicating and representing a single concept, especially in theoretical applications and practical calculations.

• From the traditional pedagogies of classrooms to the different methods and expectations of laboratory settings (for example, collaborative engagement in planning, experimentation, an understanding of experimental error, and an understanding of how all three are communicated and represented).

     

The Association between Physical Activity Behavior and Commonly Reported Barriers in a Worksite Population

Recent experiments on the ski simulator produced ambiguous results and raised unanswered questions concerning the true nature of “novice” behavior and the occurrence of behavioral changes during learning. The aim of the present experiment was to analyze the evolving behavior of three beginners during six practice sessions on a ski simulator. The position of the apparatus platform was recorded as time series and used for constructing dynamical models, including stiffness and damping functions. The results showed that novices tended to exploit a Rayleigh damping behavior during the first trials and then transition toward a van der Pol damping. These results replicate previous observations by Nourrit, Delignières, Caillou, Deschamps, and Lauriot (2003) and suggest the transition to the expert behavior could arise early in practice, when the task is of moderate difficulty. The discussion focuses on the properties of the observed learning dynamics and proposes a global conceptualization for acquiring complex motor skills.     

The Teacher's other Role

Given that many high school students come to school unmotivated to learn, the purpose of this article is to examine various motivational constructs and to determine if educators are incorporating the most effective motivational strategies. In fact, adolescents vary from adults physically, cognitively, emotionally, and physiologically and, therefore, they generally differ in their perceptions on the effectiveness of a variety of motivational practices. Students are more likely to attribute their own motivation to their intrinsic desire to learn or as a result of the goals they adopt. Teachers, on the other hand, believe students are more likely to be motivated as a result of the teachers’ actions. Teachers do not always recognize which motivational constructs are the most effective, demonstrating the value of pre-service and in-service programs that stress student motivation. If educators wish to maximize student academic achievement, they must understand how to motivate students successfully.     

The Negativism of Corporal Punishment

Educators and policymakers often believe that immigrant children perform better in school if they and their families culturally assimilate and assume the characteristics prevalent in the dominant mainstream society. Therefore, ethnic retention (i.e., immigrant families and people of color embracing their own ethnic values, artifacts, and practices) is frequently thought to be a major factor leading to academic underachievement. However, based on empirical evidence, ethnic retention is actually predictive of higher academic achievement among children from immigrant families. For blacks, although the academic benefits of cultural retention seems credible, the matter is more complex given the longer history of social oppression collectively experienced in the community. In this article, the author discusses the classroom and policy implications of these empirical findings.     

Stars

Whitney Stine's Mother Goddam: The Story of the Career of Bette Davis (New York: Hawthorne, 1974---$12.95)

Elizabeth: The Life and Career of Elizabeth Taylor (New York: Doubleday, 1974---$10.00)

Marilyn Monroe, My Story (New York: Stein & Day, 1974---$5.95)

Raymond Strait's The Tragic Secret Life of Jayne Mansfield (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1974---$7.95)

Jack Hawkins' Anything for a Quiet Life: An Autobiography (New York: Stein and Day, 1974---$7.95)

Richard Schickel's Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1974---$14.50)

Roger Manvell's Chaplin (Boston: Little-Brown, 1974---$6.95)

John McCabe's The Comedy World of Stan Laurel (New York: Doubleday, 1974---$7.95)

Arthur Lennig's The Count: The Life and Films of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi (New York: Putnam, 1974---$10.00)

Donald F. Glut's The Dracula Book (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press)

David Dalton's James Dean: The Mutant King (New York: Straight Arrow Books, 1974---$9.95)

Ray Milland's Wide-Eyed in Babylon: An Autobiography (New York: Morrow, 1974---$7.95)

Warren G. Harris' Gable and Lombard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974---$7.95)

Anthony Curtis (ed.) The Rise and Fall of the Matinee Idol: Past Dieties of Stage and Screen, Their Roles Their Magic, and Their Worshippers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974---$9.95)

Sol Chaneles and Albert Wolsky's The Movie Makers (Secaucus, N.J.: Derbibooks, 1974---$19.95)

John Kobal's 50 Super Stars (New York: Bounty Books/Crown, 1974---$9.95, paper)

John Springer and Jack Hamilton's They Had Faces Then: Super Stars, Stars and Starlets of the 1930s (New York: Citadel, 1974---$19.95)

James Robert Parish's Hollywood's Great Love Teams (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974---$14.95)     

Children With Gifts and Talents: Looking Beyond Traditional Labels

This article explored the effects of the labeling that has become commonplace in schools. Theories such as labeling theory, control theory, the Pygmalion effect, and stigma theory provide evidence of the power labeling has to negatively and positively affect children's beliefs about themselves as well as the perceptions others have of them. Renzulli (1977 Renzulli, J. S. 1977. The triad model: A guide for developing defensible programs for the gifted and talented, Mansfield Center, CT: Creative Learning Press.  [Google Scholar]) suggested changing the way we label gifted students, but this has yet to be implemented effectively in the field of gifted education. Here a renewed call for change is advocated, based on similar changes made in special education. Practical strategies are suggested to help children deal with the label of giftedness and to mitigate potential negative effects labeling may have.     

“Pretty Darned Cold”: Single Mother Students and the Community College Climate in Post-Welfare Reform America

Feminist analyses of the “chilly climate” have documented the ways in which women have been and continue to be marginalized within institutions of higher education. Yet there has been little attention to the relationship between the “chilly climate” and the lived experiences of particular populations in specific educational settings. This article attends to that relationship and draws on a two-year ethnographic study that focused on single mothers attending a community college in the Midwestern United States. Situating their experiences within the particulars of post-welfare reform America and the dynamics of the institution they attend, I argue that the educational climate these women face is particularly chilly, something that is evident in the various attitudes, practices, and policies they encounter in their interactions with faculty, staff, and other students. In addition to analyzing the ways in which the “chilly climate” influences both academic and social aspects of single mother students' experiences, I offer specific suggestions for ways in which colleges and universities can create a more welcoming and supportive environment for members of this particular student population.     

The Impact of an Ongoing Professional Development Program on Prekindergarten Teachers' Mathematics Practices

Mathematics is a natural part of daily life for young children as they explore and investigate the world around them. To build on these experiences, and to begin establishing a mathematical foundation, early childhood educators must not only be knowledgeable about mathematical concepts, they must also be aware of the most developmentally appropriate ways in which to teach these concepts to young children. After participation in an ongoing professional development program, specifically targeting teachers of prekindergarten children in public school, Preschool Programs for Children with Disabilities (PPCD), Head Start, and child care settings, teachers reported positive changes in math practices. Specifically, teachers reported a stronger alignment to national mathematics standards and increased awareness pertaining to developmentally appropriate mathematics practices as they apply to early childhood classrooms. Teachers reported a shift towards more hands-on activities and a shift away from the use of worksheets in their prekindergarten classrooms. Implications from this study suggest that ongoing professional development that is designed to meet the specific needs of early childhood educators can have a positive impact on reported mathematics content knowledge and instructional practices.     

Graduate Design Education: The Case for an Accretive Model

In 2008 the University of Melbourne began implementation of the Melbourne Model, its new vision for higher education in Australia. Six broad undergraduate university degrees have been introduced and graduate schools created. Students may now progress from an undergraduate generalist degree, with major, to a professional Masters. Alternatively, graduate lateral entry is available for students to pursue a professional qualification without prior preparation. This acceleration has significant implications for design studio teaching. Students with no design background but with an undergraduate degree are now able to study architecture or landscape architecture in just three years, compared to the previous four‐to six‐year undergraduate degrees. This article reviews and analyses the outcomes of an ‘accretive’ design studio (Christie 2002) devised for beginning Masters students which attempts to translate a new mandate of ‘acceleration’ into design pedagogy. Analysis of student focus groups, together with the work produced, revealed not only the value of the accretive model in delivering a cohesive understanding of the design process and a student engagement that exceeds the outcomes of traditional design studio but also highlights the value of an immediate immersion into a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We argue that immersion, as distinct from conventional educational models which position education as ‘training’ for a future participation in a discipline, is central to any acceleration model, serving to position students as active definers of the discipline rather than passive observers and thereby increasing ownership of their learning experience.