Journal article
Nature of engineering: a cognitive and epistemic account with implications for engineering education
- Abstract:
- Engineering education has slowly been making its way into schools with the aim of promoting engineering literacy, which is central to learning and working in a technology-oriented society. Educators and policy makers advocate the need for developing students’ understanding of the nature of engineering (NOE); yet, there is an ongoing debate on the heuristics that should be applied. In this article, we review and discuss current studies on engineering education in schools and the integration of engineering into the science curriculum. We describe four aspects of engineering fields: Structures, Machines, Materials, and Data, each uniquely characterized by the technology used and the artefact produced. We discuss the application of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to the characterization of NOE, focusing on the cognitive and epistemic domain. Accordingly, we describe NOE through four categories: Aims & Values, Engineering Practices, Methods & Methodological Rules, and Engineering Knowledge, which can guide teaching and learning about NOE. Building on the FRA, this paper provides a framework for a continuous discussion on NOE and the theoretical and practical relationships between science and engineering.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 721.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11191-022-00402-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Science and Education More from this journal
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 679–697
- Publication date:
- 2022-11-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-10-10
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-1901
- ISSN:
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0926-7220
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
-
1300892
- Local pid:
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pubs:1300892
- Deposit date:
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2023-06-28
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Barak et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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