Achievement

Research across a variety of disciplines has shown that students’ beliefs are a key predictor of learning and achievement, as well as students’ choice of learning strategies for courses in a discipline. Bodner has developed instruments to probe students’ views of the nature of engineering at various stages in their epistemic development. Results obtained with first-year engineering students suggested that these students not necessarily had well-articulated views of the engineering process. Their images of the process of engineering were often unsophisticated in terms of their understanding of the complexity of real-world engineering problems, the role of failure as well as prior success in engineering design, the importance of working with non-engineers, and so on. Bodner recommended that an explicit discussion of the nature of engineering should be incorporated in first-year engineering programs. The findings have been submitted for publication in International Journal of Engineering