A Study on Research Motivation Among Undergraduate Engineering Students: A Case Study
Research is a long-term investment, which will bring visibility and revenues for the country in the long run. In the context of product and service based organizations, research helps to know what products and services are actually needed by the customers, which is a cheaper option of manufacturing products, etc. It helps organizations to decide on the right price for the products and services as industry standard. Due to lack of research, Indian products fail to bridge the gap between the product or services and the faith of the customers. Research can be done by anyone, but academic institutions provide the necessary ambiance with the guidance of faculty, infrastructure and other resources needed for it. This research was conducted to identify motivation among under graduate students to pursue research at Regional Institute of Technology. The study focus was to find out if there were significant statistical differences on motivation factors. Mixed research approaches such as exploratory and descriptive were adopted. Non-probability sampling with convenience sampling method was used. Sample size comprised of three hundred and forty six subjects. The questionnaire was used in the survey for measuring motivation and was self-administered .Data collected was analyzed by using the statistical tests such as weighted arithmetic mean, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, and Chi-square analysis. The results indicated that motivation scores were higher among students. Interestingly, no significant differences were found on motivation attributed to gender level. Proper guidance from faculty and institution’s infrastructure motivates students to pursue research at under graduate level. In conclusion, investment in research helps students to develop critical thinking ability and problem solving attitudes. The paper concludes with few recommendations and suggestions for future studies.
What can students learn from final year research projects?
Abstract Final year research projects are a feature of most biosciences undergraduate courses. However, in a climate of increasing student numbers there is growing interest in providing alternatives to such resource-intensive projects. This interest raises some key questions. In particular, what do students learn from traditional final year projects and can alternative teaching activities be found to achieve all or some of these learning aims? This report follows from a recent Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Biosciences workshop held in the UK: ‘Alternative Final Year Projects’. At the start of the workshop results from an educational research study were used to present a characterisation of student learning on ‘traditional’ final year research projects. This report summarises these findings and aims to promote a broad discussion about what traditional projects achieve, and what alternatives might be able to offer.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.