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The need arises to equip engineering students with a wider horizon of concepts in terms of environmental, economic, and social attributes, for decision making of sensitive to sustainability issues. Pedagogic frameworks have to address a multidisciplinary analysis of sustainability. This paper addresses the rationale behind the recent integration of sustainability concepts into an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum in Hong Kong. Incentives and barriers for implementation of the curriculum are addressed. A team-based design project with a problem-based learning approach is highlighted. The initial results of stakeholder evaluations suggested that multidisciplinary skills developed during the learning process might contribute significantly to pertinent knowledge on sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of consultant’s performance is crucial to the success of a consulting assignment especially when today’s construction projects are becoming more sophisticated, large-scale, and risky. However, since individual clients have developed their own consultant’s performance evaluation (CPE) procedures, the sharing of performance information, though desirable, may not be too meaningful as the results of evaluation could be inconsistent. There is a need to examine whether a unified framework can be derived for CPE. The aim of this paper is to improve the transparency and rigorousness of CPE through the establishment of an evaluating framework for gauging the performance of engineering consultants. In this paper, a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria is identified, and the significance of these criteria is discussed through an empirical survey. Then, a multicriteria model for evaluating the performance of engineering consultants is presented. The results indicate that once an acceptable CPE framework is devised, the performance scores can be utilized for various purposes, including monitor and control, incentive and sanction, preselection, technical assessment, and bid evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new ASCE Vision and Body of Knowledge embraces the attitude toward and skills of lifelong learning, indicating the need of acquiring self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. Although civil engineering education has primarily focused on instilling technological knowledge to students, less attention has been paid toward offering deliberate training for nurturing such required high-order skills based on how people learn. This paper introduces the theoretical construct of SRL and the effective pedagogies of cultivating SRL skills from educational research findings, presents a novel instructional framework and its procedures to support students' SRL skill development, and reports its implementation outcomes in civil engineering curricula at a minority-serving institution. The key instructional strategy is to integrate the prompted self-assessment with the course learning tasks into the students' learning processes. Its effect has been evaluated through the feasible assessment practice. Assessment results reveal that the presented framework may benefit students' learning performance, and the majority of students perceived the importance of SRL skills and were interested in developing SRL skills. The limitations of this study and future improvement are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A successful civil engineering project is often a highly collaborative team-based activity, and the engineering education community must therefore prepare graduates to work in this type of environment. A large body of research has demonstrated the considerable benefits and minor organizational problems of collaborative work in higher education. However, there are only a few case studies reported in the literature that evaluate the positive and negative experiences encountered by students when undertaking group projects, and these invariably focus on first-year students. This paper contributes to this limited literature by assessing previously existing methodologies applied to group projects in the final year of an engineering degree, and compares the results with those obtained for students with no experience in collaborative work. The methodology was tested on a survey sample of 105 students enrolled in the Roads module of the new Civil and Territorial Engineering degree at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Although the results highlight the extremely positive effects of group projects on the students' perceptions, certain deficiencies were also detected relating to the lack of previous collaborative work in the students' background, an area which requires further research [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subsurface ground conditions present a big factor of uncertainty in a construction project. It is difficult to determine subsurface ground conditions even with a prebid site investigation. Nevertheless, such conditions must be included in the bid price. Due to this uncertainty, claims arise during the construction of a project. Many claims end up in litigation. This paper presents an analysis of legal cases dealing with differing subsurface ground conditions in construction contracts. By creating a database containing salient features from legal cases related to subsurface ground conditions, this research identifies the most important factors influencing the outcome of legal cases pertaining to subsurface ground conditions. Further, the most commonly used arguments by the litigating parties and the precedent cases supporting them are identified and categorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a conceptual framework for evaluating cost and performance constraints of emerging technologies. Problem of cost prediction for research and development (R&D) funding; Process of allocating R&D funds; Comparison of cost prediction alternatives.

This study describes the methodology developed for adapting project-based learning to the practice part of one subject of surveying engineering. The main innovation is the use of a system for evaluating the groups of students selected for the application of this methodology. This evaluation complements the one obtained from the project report developed by students, and it allows for individualizing the grade outcome of the members of the groups. For this purpose, the system takes into account the evaluations carried out by students of their own experience of teamwork. The system has been tested with several groups of students of surveying engineering. The results have demonstrated the efficiency of the system in showing and detecting the behavior of the groups, some problems appearing during the work, the involvement of students, and the sharing of tasks performed by some groups, among other issues. This experience can be applied to any other subject of engineering that contains a high level of practice work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]