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The complex and socially connected nature of modern engineering practice is well documented, motivating new approaches to engineering education across the globe. The challenge now is to bring about change at scale to traditional curricula [1]. The University of Sydney has implemented a core program designed to improve students' learning and preparation for professional practice. The program seeks to help students develop an appreciation of complexity in engineering practice and illustrate its interdisciplinary, connected nature. The program serves a cohort of ~800 commencing students annually and is delivered within the bounds of a traditional program structured in units of study. Standardised student satisfaction survey results have been below or well below faculty average, indicating that on this measure, a majority of students are not satisfied with their learning experience. To better understand why, student comments on these surveys were analysed through the lens of the Cynefin framework, a sense-making tool that provides a useful characterisation of complexity experienced in professional engineering [2, 3]. Analysis suggest students may be aligned along a continuum between two positions in regard to the perceived degree of complexity in the learning experience: Comfortable with complexity - Those who recognise and adopt strategies needed to succeed in complex projects; and, Resistance to complexity - Those who see the learning design as unsupportive and unnecessarily ambiguous. The results highlight issues around student perspectives of what 'learning' is, as well as structural issues existing within standardised student satisfaction surveys, each of which pose potential barriers to curriculum reform.

Copyright © 2019 Keith Willey and Tania Machet. Practising engineers are required to be independent learners, using their judgement and creativity to arrive at solutions to complex real-world problems. Research reports that these skills are currently underdeveloped in engineering students. This is not surprising given that most engineering students have undertaken mainly science and maths subjects in which they apply their mathematical knowledge to arrive at unique solutions. Conversely, in engineering practice, activities are rarely characterised by an ideal answer but rather are complex, requiring trade-offs and combining non-optimum solutions. Dealing with complex problems requires students to use judgement, subjectivity, and reasoning to make decisions instead of relying solely on the scientific evidence and facts. This challenges many students' feeling of competence and inhibits their learning motivation. In this paper, we report introducing student tutors to self-determination theory and a framework to provide a context and vocabulary to understand, reflect on and discuss learning when managing complexity to improve their students' learning and feelings of competence.

© Proceedings of the 46th SEFI Annual Conference 2018: Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Engineering Education Excellence. All rights reserved. Constructive Alignment has been widely shown to be a valuable approach to educational design, and yet there has been very limited exploration of the application of CA to the design of laboratory experiences. An analysis of existing student information on laboratory experiments shows that most student guides focus on describing the experimental activities to be carried out and often fail to provide clarity in the intended learning outcomes that are being targeted or connect these to assessment activities that allow students to assess their progress in achievement of those learning outcomes. We have argued that the application of CA to laboratory experiments will allow much more effective design. Future work in this area would focus on assessing the extent to which improved student learning outcomes can be achieved through the application of CA.

Copyright © 2019: Sarah Dart, Kim Blackmore, Keith Willey, Anne Gardner, Smitha Jose, Raj Sharma, Sloan Trad, Lesley Jolly:. Many engineering academics interested in quality teaching and learning dabble with educational research. Some go further leaving their technical research field behind to embark head-long into what for many is an initially bewildering and conceptually challenging domain. Often peers perceive this transition as a crime (giving up on real engineering) liable to be punished with reduced access to funding and institutional recognition for one's research. The Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) has been sponsoring a Winter School in Engineering Education Research Methods since 2011, to help engineering academics change their transition story from one of crime and punishment to success and reward. While helpful, this transition is not a simple matter of learning new techniques but of altering one's perspective and habits of thinking and behaviour. Many participants find this both challenging and at least initially, a lonely pursuit. In this paper, participants in the 2018 school ask the question "what enables and hinders the transition to educational research".

CONTEXT Despite their shortcomings formal examinations are often favoured as a means of achieving learning assurance as students undertake them on their own in a controlled environment. However, while formal exams may mostly ensure the integrity of a student’s submission the claim that they provide assurance of learning is less clear. Even if the questions in the exam validly assess the associated subject learning outcomes students are frequently able to pass (achieve 50%) with unsatisfactory, and perhaps even no capacity to demonstrate learning in some subject topic areas, even though they may be regarded as requisite. Furthermore, while undertaking these exams may highlight to students their learning deficiencies, there is often no opportunity for feed-forward assessments to motivate them to address these identified learning gaps. This paper reports on the impact of a threshold exam process on both student learning and assurance of that learning. PURPOSE What impact will threshold exams have on the way students behave and respond to the learning outcomes associated with a unit? APPROACH A large (>500 enrolments) multidisciplinary first year engineering subject was chosen for this study. Students were required to undertake a threshold exam in week 10 of a 13 week semester. The pass mark was set at 80%. Students who failed this threshold exam were invited to attend a workshop and sit a supplementary threshold exam at the end of the semester. This study used discussion forum posts, student surveys, tutorial discussions and analysis of exam results to investigate how student’s behaviour changed as a result of the threshold exam and the impact on their learning. RESULTS Despite many students having an objection to an 80% pass rate perceiving it as unfair, the threshold assessments had a significant impact on the way students approached their learning and engaged in their tutorials and other learning activities. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrated the potential of a threshold examination process to improve confidence in assurance of learning. Many student who failed the initial threshold exam focused on mechanical level conceptualisations of learning which suggests long-term changes to their learning culture requires more scaffolding and adoption of such practices in more units of study.

The increased adoption of blended learning designs such as flipped instruction by STEM academics has brought learning benefits for many students; however, it relies heavily on students being able to take much more responsibility for their own learning than in traditional lecture-based subjects (Reidsema et al 2017). Previous studies (Willey & Gardner 2015, 2014a, 2014b, Gardner et al. 2014, Willey et al. 2014) of students in two different engineering majors at the University of Technology Sydney have shown that students who perform poorly in flipped learning environments typically do not demonstrate the agency and self-efficacy necessary to take responsibility for their own learning and hence have difficulty achieving the cognitive changes expressed as learning outcomes in subjects. Poor self-efficacy, that is a competence belief about one’s capability to execute a particular action and achieve a particular goal, has been linked to attrition in previous research: Many different factors underpin attrition decisions in any one institution and for any one individual, for whom attrition usually results from the aggregation of diverse factors rather than 'the straw that broke the camel's back'. The only attrition triggers which span most universities and years of study are lack of clear reasons for being at university or academic self-efficacy (Willcoxson et al 2011)[6]. Crick and Goldspink (2014) refer to the link between learning dispositions, agency and identity and how students’ thinking about these concepts, such as self-efficacy, frames their future learning trajectories. While university programmes generally address knowledge generation, Crick et al (2015) argue that forming a learning identity is also “pedagogically significant”. The research of Thomas (2013) reports that ...students often experience stress, uncertainty and use ineffective learning strategies when they are not supported to understand how to direct their own learning... findings suggest that learners can demonstrate increases to cognitive and metacognitive functioning, as well as self-efficacy through engagement with a program to support self-regulated learning... However, Thomas (2013) also found that there are “significant challenges to encouraging all students to engage with such a program”. Buckingham Shum and Crick (2012) point out that the development of self-regulation and self-efficacy impacts not just student performance at university but also their performance in the workplace: Theoretical and empirical evidence in the learning sciences substantiates the view that deep engagement in learning is a function of a complex combination of learners’ identities, dispositions, values, attitudes and skills. When these are fragile, learners struggle to achieve their potential in conventional assessments, and critically, are not prepared for the novelty and complexity of the challenges they will meet in the workplace, and the many other spheres of life which require personal qualities such as resilience, critical thinking and collaboration skills.

Written communication is neither systematically developed nor practised in the engineering curriculum, despite expectations by universities and employers that engineering graduates will be proficient communicators, and despite interventions to develop students’ writing. The gap in the development of students’ written communication calls for an investigation into the continuing invisibility of writing practices in the engineering curriculum. The lens of practice architectures theory was used to explore how engineering academics view writing in their engineering subjects, and how they develop the writing practices of their students. Practice architectures theory sees practices as shaped by and shaping cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. A qualitative study examined engineering academics’ teaching practices and the extent to which writing is practised and developed within the subjects they teach. Results show the majority of engineering academics in this study view writing as separate from technical engineering knowledge. This impacts the prevailing teaching and assessment practices by not providing opportunities for writing to be practised and developed within the context of engineering education. Unless there is conscious inclusion of writing practices, prevailing teaching and assessment practices will continue to focus on the acquisition of propositional knowledge to the exclusion of the development of writing practices.