Supporting students' need for relatedness in a basic engineering course

Due to the small amount of interest electrical engineering students find in the basic electric circuits course, the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has decided to incorporate into the course, for the first time, examples reflecting the various fields of study in the Department and the diverse occupational areas of electrical engineers. According to the self-determination theory, these examples may enhance students’ sense of relatedness to the Department and increase their intrinsic motivation and interest in the course. The method of teaching used in the course is the traditional lecture-based one, thus the course is substantially different from similar courses developed recently that employ non-traditional ways to teach the topic of electric circuits, such as project-based learning or collaborative learning. The aim of the study described here was to identify the ways (if any) by of which the teacher was able to raise students’ interest in the course. Seventy-two sophomore electrical engineering students took part in the study. Data were collected by open-ended, anonymous questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The qualitative findings were categorized by content analysis. According to the findings, students found the improved course interesting thanks to the examples that were integrated into it. Their interest was derived from several sources: an acquaintance with the areas of teaching and research taking place in the Department, an initial exposure to an electrical engineer’s field of practice, and tying in the studied material to electronic systems familiar to the students from their everyday life. In light of the self-determination theory, the interest the course in its new format managed to raise among the students can be attributed to meeting the students’ need for relatedness during the course. The contribution of the research is in the characterization of simple and low-cost methods by of which the teacher is able to raise the interest among students attending a basic course on electric circuits. This contribution is likely to be expressed in developing new basic courses on engineering and improving the existing ones.