Starting in fall 2015, it is possible for all Swedish upper secondary schools that offer the Technology Programme, to start a one-year vocational educational program, directed to one of four technology knowledge fields. Students with a degree from the three-year Technology Programme can apply to this additional fourth year and obtain qualified graduate from upper secondary engineering course status. After graduation students are qualified either to work as an engineer or to apply for higher studies in engineering (www.skolverket.se).
CDIO, a way of thinking when conducting engineering education is one of the pedagogical methods introduced in this additional year of engineering education. To facilitate this was CDIO introduced and support material handed out to teachers during conferences arranged by the Swedish National Agency for Education in fall 2015. A pilot study, which analyses the implementation of CDIO, is performed by KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). Teachers’ expectations on the support material are also examined.
A questionnaire was sent to all teachers that participated in the conferences and based on their answers informants were selected for further interviews. The analysis was done using the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) along with semi-structured interviews. RGT derives from George Kelly’s (1963) reasoning about how we understand the world around us. Kelly argues that based on our experiences we build a worldview with the help of bipolar interpretations called constructs. With RGT we elicit a persons constructs on a certain topic. This study examines, with RGT, teachers’ expectations on teaching material that support students’ development of engineering knowledge and skills. The results show teachers’ views on CDIO on upper secondary level and the characteristics of teaching materials supporting students’ development into engineers.
Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016