Teacher-Researchers as Levers of Doctoral Curriculum in Engineering

Abstract

Abstract-Policy-level interventions aim to expedite institutional change in universities but the related decisions rarely materialize as sustained grassrootslevel implementations genuinely transforming teaching or learning practices. As a solution, educational authorities have called for scientific evidence as base for university reforms. This article showcases an empirical development endeavor from Aalto University that, while responding to doctoral students' learning needs and institutional demands for higher publication productivity, paves the way for a more extensive bottom-up institutional reform of doctoral education. The data-driven analysis of a sample of 381 doctoral candidates in engineering directs the pedagogic focus in a doctoral writing course away from grammar and language proficiency towards writing support that accentuates usability and communicative value. The primary aim is to conceptualize a writing intervention that is based on authentic researcher needs. The secondary aim is to substantiate allocation of language teachers' working hours to research by demonstrating how audience needs analyses can benefit teacher renewal, the quality of education, and institutional performance as measured through key institutional metrics.

On the Rocky Road to Academia: Stumbling Blocks for Finnish Engineering Students with English as a Second Language

“…Finally, subsection 5.4 focuses attention on challenges in the peer review process. Many of the challenges, such as acquiring the academic writing style, expressing views with precision, or mastering grammar, are recognized also by students themselves, but they are generally unaware of some of the problems, like the lack of hedging strategies or the ambiguous use of tenses [33].…”

Tracing Pedagogical Progression on the Doctoral Level

“…To promote the overall perception of caring, attention and support in class, the 3-ECTS Writing Doctoral Research course at Aalto University dedicates as much class time to peer feedback as is reasonable against the learning objectives. The 36-hour course workflow is described in more detail in [51]. What is essential here is that each lecture ends in a 30-minute peer review, in which students monitor each other's products against a checklist that reviews the topics covered in the session in question.…”