University teachers’ perspectives on the role of the Laplace transform in engineering education

ABSTRACT

The Laplace transform is an important tool in many branches of engineering, for example, electric and control engineering, but is also regarded as a difficult topic for students to master. We have interviewed 22 university teachers from five universities in three countries (Mexico, Spain and Sweden) about their views on relationships among mathematics, physics and technology/application aspects in the process of learning the Laplace transform in engineering education. Strikingly, the teachers held a spectrum of qualitatively differing views, ranging from seeing virtually no connection (e.g. some thought the Laplace transform has no relevance in engineering), through to regarding the aspects as intimately, almost inseparably linked. The lack of awareness of the widely differing views among teachers might lead to a lack of constructive alignment among different courses that is detrimental to the quality of engineering education.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering education research
• didactics (Pedagogy) of higher education
• electrical engineering
• mathematics education
• constructive alignment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Margarita Holmberg (née González Sampayo) holds an engineering degree in communication and electronics from Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City and a joint PhD in Engineering education research from Linköping University and Universitat de Barcelona. She is profesora titular in engineering, communication and electronics with specialisation in automatic control at Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City. She is also affiliated with the Engineering education research group at ITN, Linköping University.

Jonte Bernhard holds an MSc degree in Engineering Physics and a PhD (Engineering) in Solid State Physics from Uppsala University. He is professor in Engineering Education at Linköping University and an affiliated professor at Royal Institute of Technology – KTH, Stockholm. He is also associate editor of the European Journal of Engineering Education and member of the board of the international Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN).

ORCID

Jonte Bernhard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7708-069X

Notes

1. The spelling used in German and the Nordic languages is deliberately used to distinguish the term, as applied here, from the word didactic in English, which has slightly different connotations.

2. The transcript from teacher 15’s interview is presented solely to illustrate our method for analysing and representing interviews, rather than because we think that his or her views are more important than those of any other teachers.

Additional information

Funding

This research has in part been supported by grant VR 721-2011-5570 from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).