An Investigation into Mathematics for Undergraduate Engineering Education to Improve Student Competence in Important Mathematics Skills

Several convictions premise this work. First, that mathematics is a crucial part of the toolset required by engineers if they are to practice responsibly; how else can one predict consequences of innovative engineering actions and designs? Also, that faculty perceive that students often find mathematics neither helpful nor essential, but instead find it frustrating, painful and discouraging. This work shows that this perception of a gap is not only valid and widespread within engineering, and across the various departments, but is widespread for different backgrounds and across various mathematics subjects. Given that elucidating the importance of mathematics is crucial to engineering, is there an issue with student competence in mathematics? In seeking to answer this question, this endeavour is intended to be climactic, because it is not merely knowing that mathematics is essential, knowing if there is a struggle is imperative, which helps understand if a change is needed to teach mathematics to engineers and to open the doors for future discourse. This project uses a mixed-methods study, explicitly using a post-positivist, pragmatic research paradigm completed through an explanatory sequential framework. The 2017-2018 academic year was used to collect data. The findings suggest faculty agree that mathematics plays an important role in engineering, that students' need to be better at general and specific mathematics skills, and that revisiting how one teaches mathematics to engineering students is required. In an effort to provide students with a better learning environment, it is helpful to revisit the engineering mathematics curriculum. Engineering practice is dynamic, technologies change, even becoming obsolete. The same should be valid for how to impart the curriculum to students, which should encourage modernizing teaching methods to improve knowledge transfer for student success. Through the lenses of pedagogy, instructional design, and cognitive psychology offer opportunities to improve the existing curriculum as it relates to student achievement. Thus, one of the predominant outcomes of this project is to provide a study of best practices for mathematics education for engineering students, along with the perceptions of faculty about these same practices.Ph.D