The paper is part of a pilot study exploring how undergraduate engineering students at one Australian university perceive their own employability development over the span of their degree. The paper outlines approaches to defining employability and the individual factors within employability. Students across a range of year levels were surveyed about their perceived employability, which refers to how likely it is that an individual believes they will be able to gain employment. The paper discusses the survey results and finds that perceived employability drops as students progress through the year levels of their degree. The study strengthens previous research in this area, and reinforces the need for universities to ensure that students are supported as they enter the labour market to become the engineering professionals of the future.

PurposeThis study was conducted to gain a better understanding of engineering students' perceptions of the meaning of employability and the activities that contribute to employability development.Design/methodology/approachA survey was used to take a cross-section of student perspectives at key stages in the degree, and was followed by a series of focus groups to further explore student opinions on employability. Responses to selected open-ended questions and relevant sections of focus group transcripts were analysed using a thematic analysis approach.FindingsIt was found that students have different perspectives on the meaning of employability, with the majority describing employability as having the right skills, attributes or competencies. Employability development activities were integrated into three broad categories: developing engineering knowledge, skills and industry experience; career building and industry awareness; and degree progression and completion. Participants also identified barriers to employability development and suggested areas for improvement.Practical implicationsThe study recommends university staff ensure there is a shared understanding of employability within the student cohort by explicitly reframing employability as being about becoming a professional and that students are repeatedly exposed to the relevant set of industry competencies or standards. The study also outlines a range of activities that students connect to their employability development.Originality/valueThe findings of this study will assist university staff across the sector to make decisions about how they can best support employability development in their undergraduate students.

This paper illustrates the teaching approaches to assessment that foster independent learning in an undergraduate course in the discipline of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. A web‐based circuit simulator of CircuitLab was used to implement some of the laboratory tasks. Practical solutions have been applied to bridge the learning achievement gap between the formative laboratory assessment and the summative examination. To promote creative and independent learning, unique individual self‐discovery projects were given to each student. The projects are generated according to each student's student number in an innovative approach to prevent plagiarism. The scaffolding and self‐discovery lab activities can be modified to be pure online versions, which had been attested in the online course delivery during the COVID‐19 lockdown period in 2020.

This study seeks to investigate academics' perceptions and experiences with traditional final examinations in engineering courses. An online survey of 40 academics was conducted to understand the academics' beliefs and rationale for the use of final examinations in their teaching practices. The survey was followed by in-person interviews with 11 academics to clarify the outcomes of the online survey. The results indicated that most academics considered the final examination as an effective and equitable way of assessing student knowledge and skills. However, the findings also showed that final examinations generally might not provide students with proper feedback, and traditional final examinations might not be effective in testing students' practical and soft skills required by industry.

Griffith University offers Engineering programmes over two campuses in South East Queensland, Australia. A large proportion of students are the first in their families to attend university, with many from low socio-economic backgrounds. In 2017, Griffith moved to a trimester system, and the School of Engineering and Built Environment restructured the first-year engineering curriculum to provide an improved engineering experience focusing on key educational outcomes for its diverse student population.This article describes and evaluates the new integrated first-year curriculum, which includes a mix of traditionally taught, partially experiential, and fully experiential courses. The curriculum structure is discussed, and the outcomes evaluated in terms of student achievement, progression, and satisfaction. Findings of this evaluation indicate that teaching staff have a crucial role in ensuring courses are well received, traditionally taught mathematics courses do not appear to be meeting the needs of the students, and that ‘C’ is unlikely to be a good choice for a first programming language for engineering students. However, the restructuring shows some preliminary success in terms of increased retention when coupled with proactive outreach. Further research into student perceptions and performance across courses with different teaching approaches is recommended.

The introduction of experiential learning content into a first-year Engineering Materials (1017ENG) is investigated. The success of 1017ENG is evaluated in the context of an earlier, similar traditional offering of the course (1502ENG). The student experience of course (SEC) evaluation data and student performance in 1017ENG and 1502ENG are compared. Student satisfactions levels are found to be maintained in 1017ENG and the experiential focus results in an overall improvement in student performance. There is no significant difference in the proportions of low-achieving students (those recording a 'Fail' grade) or in the proportions of the highest achieving students (those recording a '7'). The overall improvement in performance arises from the notable differences in the proportions of middle-range of students for the two courses (i.e. in the proportions of students with '4' and '6' grades).

In the current economic environment, some engineering graduates have experienced difficulties in finding suitable graduate roles, and graduate employability has become an important issue for educational institutions. The gap between the capability of engineering graduates and the expectations of industry might be attributed to the fact that some aspects of the engineering curriculum are overly theoretical in nature, and this leads to issues where students are unable to apply what they have learnt when they join industry (Li, Ochsner, & Hall, 2019; Male & King, 2014). This could be caused by a lack of connection and interaction between educational institutions and industry, and as a result, the curriculum frequently fails to meet the needs of the industry (Shukla & Garg, 2016). It has been suggested that engineering students should be exposed to professional engineering practice during their courses (Allen, 1996). Others (King, 2008) have also suggested students should have closer involvement with engineering practice through site visits, exposure to practicing engineers, and involvement in practical engineering project work within their courses. It has been recognised that industry engagement within engineering education can help students to increase their motivation for learning as they can better understand the context and the connections to engineering practice (Male & King, 2014). It is clear that the increased motivation is able to enhance students’ engagement in learning in terms of their attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion.

Engineering education increasingly involves working in groups. This is partly because of a growing value placed on graduate attributes relating to effective team working, and partly a response to the practicalities of working with large groups in an educational environment and the emphasis on peer learning. This chapter argues that a superficial approach to understanding the drivers for establishing and managing groups during first year activities can have negative outcomes, including re-enforcing majority dominance. This will potentially contribute to attrition amongst minority students and undermine the outcomes for the engineering cohort as a whole. This chapter provides strategies for building groups in the first year focussing on team building, valuing diversity and cultural awareness. It emphasises the importance of transferable skills for students and of understanding themselves, their heritage, attitudes and values and their contribution to a team, building an approach to support diversity in teams throughout the engineering degree program.

Engineering education increasingly involves working in groups. This is partly because of a growing value placed on graduate attributes relating to effective team working, and partly a response to the practicalities of working with large groups in an educational environment and the emphasis on peer learning. This chapter argues that a superficial approach to understanding the drivers for establishing and managing groups during first year activities can have negative outcomes, including re-enforcing majority dominance. This will potentially contribute to attrition amongst minority students and undermine the outcomes for the engineering cohort as a whole. This chapter provides strategies for building groups in the first year focussing on team building, valuing diversity and cultural awareness. It emphasises the importance of transferable skills for students and of understanding themselves, their heritage, attitudes and values and their contribution to a team, building an approach to support diversity in teams throughout the engineering degree program.

Context: Introduction to Structures 1801ENG, is a first year engineering course which aims to introduce structural concepts to Architecture and Industrial Design students. The students are from different age groups, cultural and educational backgrounds and bring with them different needs and academic potential. Over the past two years, the teaching team has observed that the majority of the students seem to have adopted a surface learning approach, and thus did not retain the knowledge of the material taught over the course of the semester. Previous researchers have shown that approaches to learning are associated with the students' perceptions of their learning environment Parpala, Lindblom‐Ylanne, Komulainen, Litmanen, and Hirsto (2010) as well as different approaches to teaching Trigwell, Prosser, and Waterhouse (1999). It is believed that the passive teaching scheme and the lack of consideration of students' backgrounds in the design of the learning activities has had a negative effect on students' engagement, and has encouraged them to adopt surface learning approaches towards the course material. Purpose: In this study, the effect of collaborative and cooperative forms of active learning on improving students' engagement and retention of knowledge and its relation to the background of the learner is investigated. Approach: The relation between the learners' background and their performance in different types of learning activities and assessments in two consecutive years are investigated herein. The numerical data are presented in form of graphs and tables and the results are validated by formal surveys, performance in the assessments and quantitative and qualitative feedback at the end of semesters. Results: The results showed that performance of younger students in a problem solving exam is greatly enhanced by encouraging them to study in groups supervised by the teaching team. Teamwork also proved to have a positive effect on the performance of students with OP>10 in MCQ and analytical report writing assessments. Experiential learning proved to enhance engagement and the retention rate, however allocating extra time to the experiential learning activities had a negative effect on the performance of younger students. Conclusions: Based on the current results, some recommendations have been made that can be used for a redesign of the learning activities and assessments of the course. The recommended changes account for students' knowledge background, performance in high school and age. The results also highlighted the significant positive effect of learning activities in the form of competitions on the overall performance of the learners.

Background: Understanding the factors which lead to student success or failure has long been an important matter for educators. Researchers like Zimmer et al. (1996) have focused on a particular science course to find the factors which lead to success, whereas others like Tynjala et al. (2005) have examined an entire engineering program or degree to investigate the reasons behind students' performance. Although a number of factors have been identified by different scholars such as Cahan et al. (1989), there are still many aspects which have not yet been explored/examined. Purpose: This research has aimed to focus on a particular engineering course to enable a better investigation tailored to engineering students. In this regard, students of two Engineering Mechanics classes (the 2012 and 2013 academic years) have been chosen at Griffith University and their personal characteristics have been explored to determine key factors leading to a satisfactory final mark in the mentioned course. The results would allow course convenors to more quickly identify vulnerable students. Design/Method: The parameters which have already been investigated by researchers are very broad. However, based on the available resources for this study and also considering the most important and effective parameters (inferred from Cahan et al. (1989) and Hoskins et al. (1997)), the following factors have been selected for detailed analysis: gender, age, first language, study program, prior grade point average (GPA) and overall positions (OP). Simple statistical analyses have been conducted for each of these parameters in light of the students' final mark. In addition, the correlation between scalar parameters (such as age) and final mark has also been observed. Results: Simple descriptive analysis has shown that there are no major differences between the 2012 and 2013 cohorts. The maximum, minimum and average marks for these classes were quite close. In particular, younger students achieved both the highest and lowest marks. Age did not affect the performance of mature students who were more evenly distributed in the middle range of results. Likewise, those from non-English speaking backgrounds were reasonably competitive with the others. More interestingly, no major difference was found between genders, although Hoskins et al. (1997) and Diaz (2003) both argued that there are differences in performance based on gender. Finally, the prior GPA and OP have shown a significant contribution to a better final mark. Conclusions: The factors studied in this research have highlighted the important parameters for students' success. These should be noticed in the earliest stages of the semester to identify at-risk students to help them avoid becoming student-in-need later in the semester.