posted on 2014-06-04, 13:59authored byBurkhard A. Alpers, Marie Demlova, Carl-Henrik Fant, Tommy Gustafsson, Duncan Lawson, Leslie Mustoe, Brita Olsen-Lehtonen, Carol Robinson, Daniela Velichova
This document adapts the competence concept to the mathematical education of engineers and
explains and illustrates it by giving examples. It also provides information for specifying the extent to
which a competency should be acquired. It does not prescribe a particular level of progress for
competence acquisition in engineering education. There are many different engineering branches
and many different job profiles with various needs for mathematical competencies; consequently it is
not appropriate to specify a fixed profile. The competence framework serves as an analytical
framework for thinking about the current state in one’s own institution and also as a design
framework for specifying the intended profile. A sketch of an example profile for a practice-oriented
study course in mechanical engineering is given in the document. This document retains the list of
content-related learning outcomes (slightly modified) that formed the ‘kernel’ of the previous
curriculum document. These are still important because lecturers teaching application subjects want
to be sure that students have at least an ‘initial familiarity’ with certain mathematical concepts and
procedures which they need in their application modelling.
In order to offer helpful orientation for designing teaching processes, teaching and learning
environments and approaches are outlined which help students to obtain the competencies to an
adequate degree. It is clear that such competencies cannot be obtained by simply listening to lectures,
so adequate forms of active involvement of students need to be included. Moreover, in a
competence-based approach the mathematical education must be integrated in the surrounding
engineering study course to really achieve the ability to use mathematics in engineering contexts.
The document presents several forms of how this integration can be realized. This integration is
essential to the development of competencies and will require close co-operation between mathematics
academics and their engineering counterparts. Finally, since assessment procedures determine
to a great extent the behaviour of students, it is extremely important to address competency
acquisition in assessment schemes. Ideas for doing this are also outlined in the document.
The main purpose of this document is to provide orientation for those who set up concrete
mathematics curricula for their specific engineering programme, and for lecturers who think about
learning and assessment arrangements for achieving the intended level of competence acquisition. It
also serves as a framework for the group’s future work and discussions.
History
School
Science
Department
Mathematics Education Centre
Citation
ALPERS, B.A. ... et al, 2013. A framework for mathematics curricula in engineering education: a report of the mathematics working group. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI).
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2013
Notes
This report was produced by the mathematics working group and published by European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Brussels.