Learning Approaches in Post-Secondary Engineering Education – A Scoping Review
Date
2024-01-16
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Abstract
This scoping review is aimed at doing a survey of the learning approaches used by students in engineering education. These approaches could be directly employed by the students or impacted by the teaching strategies used by educators. There seem to be two dominant perspectives on student learning in the field: deep learning and surface learning. The former can be referred to as high-level learning and is highly supported and aimed by educators. The latter is perceived to be a less attractive approach and is often regarded as the opposite of deep learning where students do not necessarily understand a concept but can reproduce the target content during exams or other assessment tasks because they have memorized it. However, we believe that student learning can not always be categorized as deep or surface as there can be practices that fall in-between the two (pattern recognition, mental models, and free learning are some examples reported in the literature). What we intend to do in this scoping review is a survey of the existing approaches reported by the researchers so that we can 1) identify the types of learning approaches dominant in the field; 2) clarify how these approaches are understood and described in the literature; 3) identify and analyze knowledge gaps in the existing literature; and 4) propose a way forward for engineering education in the form of a theoretical framework that can guide future teaching and learning practices as well as research in the field of engineering education. Since there is scarcity of research on the learning approaches in the field of engineering education, a scoping review was considered appropriate to determine what evidence exists on the topic and what “more specific questions can be posed and valuably addressed by a more precise systemic review” (Munn et al., 2018, p. 2).