Proceedings of ‏The 3rd International Conference on Research in Education, Teaching and Learning

Year: 2020

DOI:

Fulltext PDF 

How the current practice of learning instruction engages engineering students into learning in Edinburgh College?

Daniel Erasto Santos Reyes, Aileen McGuigan

ABSTRACT: 

Over the last few decades, significant progress has been achieved by educational researchers in developing an understanding of the nature of learning, across settings, and identifying principles which have enabled educators to design and develop learning and assessment approaches more effectively. This design research project addressed the following: How does the current practice of learning instruction or activity engage students or their attention in such a way that keeps the students’ interest in it and gets them actively involved in it? In order to approach the research problem, three research questions were formulated in order to focus data gathering: How successful is the current practice in directing or guiding students to appropriate learning activities or specific engineering knowledge? How effective is the existing practice of learning activity in promoting the acquisition of specific engineering knowledge or skills? How appealing is the existing practice of learning activity to engineering students? A qualitative research methodology was used to approach the research problem. Semi-structured interviews, observations, and artefact analysis were the main procedures used to obtain data. This paper presents only the results of the interview procedures. The interview transcripts coding evolved into six major themes and one concept that intend to reflect what works well in Edinburgh College (EC) engineering classroom learning. These major themes and concept represent valuable engineering students’ voices that will be communicated to the relevant stakeholders and will inform design for learning activities in order to create new learning approaches. It is hoped that these will improve the current practice of teaching and learning in this educational setting.

Keywords: design research, design for learning, instructional strategies, instructional design,
students’ voice.