Toward Teaching Methods that Develop Learning and Problem Solving Skills in Engineering Students
Abstract
Problem solving skills and abilities are critical in life and more specifically in the engineering field. Unfortunately, significant numbers of South African students who are accessing higher education are lacking problem solving skills and this results into poor academic performance jeopardizing their progress especially from first to second year. On the other hand, teaching problem solving to under-prepared first year learners is a challenge to academics that are required to think in innovative ways about teaching and learning strategies in order to respond in an efficient manner to South Africa’s high demand for quality engineering graduates. This paper discusses two successful sample lessons of how higher-order thinking skills can be integrated into the content of a so called “bottle-neck” subject namely Electrical Engineering 1 (EE1), with the goal of enhancing problem solving skills and consequently improve under-prepared learners’ performance. The importance of developing active student engagement practice as well as conceptual understanding is highlighted.Downloads
Copyright (c) 2016 Kabulo Loji

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This journal is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors, copyright holders, may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors' publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal homepage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: This is an electronic version of an article published in SAJHE, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX “XXX", DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://www.journals.ac.za/index.php/SAJHE) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
Attribution CC BY-NC-ND 4.0