Active Learning in Engineering Education: a (re)introduction

ABSTRACT

The informal network ‘Active Learning in Engineering Education’ (ALE) has been promoting Active Learning since 2001. ALE creates opportunity for practitioners and researchers of engineering education to collaboratively learn how to foster learning of engineering students. The activities in ALE are centred on the vision that learners construct their knowledge based on meaningful activities and knowledge. In 2014, the steering committee of the ALE network reinforced the need to discuss the meaning of Active Learning and that was the base for this proposal for a special issue. More than 40 submissions were reviewed by the European Journal of Engineering Education community and this theme issue ended up with eight contributions, which are different both in their research and Active Learning approaches. These different Active Learning approaches are aligned with the different approaches that can be increasingly found in indexed journals.     

Conditional Autonomy

Current developments in the Swedish news business have resulted in clashes between the professional stands of journalists and the incentives of their managers, or—from a theoretical perspective—a confrontation between discourses of journalistic professionalism and managerialism. While professionalism includes values of autonomy, self-regulation and public interest, managerialism on the other hand promotes business ideals, standardisation and organisational efficiency. Above all, it promotes a centralised management model of line control at the cost of collegial decision-making and peer review. But what does this mean in practice? In what situations does the negotiation between those discourses arise in everyday news work and how does it affect the autonomy of journalists?

This paper aims to answer those questions by focusing on the experiences of Swedish journalists working in the tension field between professional and managerial discourses. This empirical study includes observation studies as well as interviews with journalists and their managers in four Swedish daily newspapers.

The results clearly reveal a conditioned journalistic autonomy, and shows how professional ideals are tarnished. The economistic view of journalistic activities is forcefully and successfully implemented by management.     

“You can't make this a science!” — Analyzing decision support systems in political contexts

This paper reports on problems and conflicts encountered when using decision support systems (DSS) in political contexts. Based on a literature study and two case studies we describe problems encountered in relation not only to the DSS itself, but also to the political decision process. The case studies have been carried out in two cities in Sweden that at different times but in similar situations have used DSS in order to reach a decision in complicated and contested matters. In both cases we have previously found that the method and IT tool used for decision analysis were appreciated by most participants, but the inherent rationality of the DSS was in conflict with how participants usually make decisions as well as with the political process. The assumption was that a strict and open method would make grounds for clear decisions, but the results of the decision process were none of the cases implemented. In one case the result of the decision analysis was that no clear decision was made. In the other case the lowest ranked alternative was implemented. Furthermore, in neither city the method was ever used again. We therefore ask: What are the challenges and limitations to using DSS in political contexts? Our study shows that challenges relate to selecting and using criteria; eliciting weights for criteria (high level of subjectivity); understanding all the amount of facts available in the system; time constraints; and lack of impact on the final decision. This study contributes to both research and practice by increasing the understanding of what challenges are experienced in DSS use, since the findings can be used as a framework of challenges that should be addressed, in design of systems as well as method for use. The study also contributes to understanding the role of politicians in decision-making and the consequences for the use of DSS. Further, the literature study showed that there are overall very few studies on the actual use of DSS in a political context, and we therefore conclude by encouraging more studies reporting actual use.     

Boundary crossing between higher education and the world of work: a case study in post-1994 Rwanda

Workplaces abound with knowledge that is different from the knowledge students gain at universities. Crossing the boundary from a university to a workplace can, therefore, be difficult for students. To compensate for the dearth of knowledge on how these issues play out in an African context, this study investigates how knowledge and experiences gained during academic studies were useful in the workplace by interviewing employers from sectors commonly open to university graduates and student representatives from all faculties at a Rwandan University. Open questionnaires were used to ascertain what kinds of changes might lead to more successful boundary crossing. The findings suggest that while domain-specific knowledge is an essential part of a university qualification, a stronger focus on generic skills is needed in order to help students cross the boundary and succeed in the workplace.     

Using Class Blogs in 1:1 Schools—Searching for Unexplored Opportunities

This article focuses on class blogs and presents results from 1:1 schools in Sweden. While Swedish schools are increasingly using Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., wikis and blogs), most of this use is still at an experimental stage. To further the understanding of how blogs are and can be used, we compare class blogs used in practice with the fast-growing literature in the field. Previous work suggests eight uses: collaboration, making assignments, journal writing, instruction, posting supplemental material, community building, external readers, and prompting. In practice, we found blogs to be used in a fairly narrow way—mainly for instruction and posting supplemental material. We hope that this article will inspire teachers to further their blog use.     

Dyslexia heterogeneity: cognitive profiling of Portuguese children with dyslexia

Recent studies have emphasized that developmental dyslexia is a multiple-deficit disorder, in contrast to the traditional single-deficit view. In this context, cognitive profiling of children with dyslexia may be a relevant contribution to this unresolved discussion. The aim of this study was to profile 36 Portuguese children with dyslexia from the 2nd to 5th grade. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to group participants according to their phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and nonverbal intelligence abilities. The results suggested a two-cluster solution: a group with poorer performance on phoneme deletion and rapid automatized naming compared with the remaining variables (Cluster 1) and a group characterized by underperforming on the variables most related to phonological processing (phoneme deletion and digit span), but not on rapid automatized naming (Cluster 2). Overall, the results seem more consistent with a hybrid perspective, such as that proposed by Pennington and colleagues (2012), for understanding the heterogeneity of dyslexia. The importance of characterizing the profiles of individuals with dyslexia becomes clear within the context of constructing remediation programs that are specifically targeted and are more effective in terms of intervention outcome.     

Effects of tactile training on visual speechreading: performance changes related to individual differences in cognitive skills

We report on a follow-up study of the R?nnberg, Andersson, Lyxell, & Spens (1998) speech tracking training study. The purpose was to examine, initially and after training, the effects of different tactile aids on tasks of visual speechreading. We also examined cognitive prerequisites for initial baseline speechreading and posttraining speechreading performance. Compared with speechreading alone, tactile aids impaired sentence-based speechreading at first, although performance improved with training. No effects of vibrotactile aids or training were obtained for visual word-decoding. Initial baseline speechreading performance and posttraining performance correlated with cognitive skills, but the size of the correlations changed. The size of the correlations also varied with the different tactually mediated speechreading conditions.     

Supervisory Behaviour as Perceived by Secondary School Teachers in Nigeria

This article focuses on the concept of work‐organization in general and the adaptation of this concept to the (Swedish) school‐system in particular. One major point stressed by the authors is that the work‐organization of the school is not purely a question of technical forms of administration. When establishing work‐organization it is of crucial importance to take the functions of the school into consideration. This means that the first step is to focus the content of the organizational activities and then build up administrative forms which facilitate a goal‐oriented work.