A Look at Vocational and Academic Student Backgrounds In Ability to Solve Practical Problems

While most students in the UK will enter engineering degrees with traditional academic qualifications, a significant proportion will come from backgrounds which use vocational based qualifications to gain entry to degree level study.

Indicators show that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to be among those using vocational qualifications to gain entry to University and may not progress as well. This is often linked to difficulties in traditional academic elements of the degree such as mathematics where both the content and learning approaches are much less familiar to students with a vocational background. These academic skills are not the only skillset needed of a graduate engineer and to look at ability in practical problem solving a trial was devised.

Students in their first year of a range of engineering degree programmes were recruited from a number of disciplines including those on mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering degrees and having entered those degrees from a range of educational backgrounds.

Students were paired up to work on a series of short problem solving exercises designed to require an element of logical and creative thought of the type needed in engineering problem solving but were such that no specific technical knowledge was needed. Work was videoed and then encoded to help with analysis.

The work, while from a small sample size, appeared to illustrate that students on engineering programmes want to solve problems and capability appeared to be independent of educational background suggesting this skill may be lost to society if engineering students from vocational backgrounds drop out early due to struggles with more academic topics.