First professor of Engineering Education

Jonte Bernhard is Sweden’s first professor of Engineering Education, a relatively new research subject which is now spreading across the world. The knowledge of how students connect formulae to reality is central in his research.

“We get students coming here who have the highest marks in everything, but who have no comprehension of how the formulae they have learnt relate to reality, and we have students on advanced courses in circuit theory who don't understand the basics of electromagnetics. Many people think it’s the maths that is difficult, but the difficult thing for the students is to relate the formulae to reality,” says Bernhard, who recently who will be inaugurated as professor of Engineering Education at Linköping University in the next few days.

Bernhard will also become Sweden’s first professor on the subject and one of the few in the world, since this is a relatively new field of research.

He found the first treatises in the former East Germany, at the University of Dresden, and in Austria. The first doctor in the subject graduated in 2006 from Purdue University in the United States, followed later that year by the first doctor in the subject from Linköping University, Campus Norrköping.  Physics and natural sciences education has long been a subject of research.

“But interest in Engineering Education is increasing and has been doing so since the turn of the century,” says Bernhard.

He himself began to put comprehension questions in his exams a while back, thinking that they would be very simple, but instead they proved major stumbling blocks.

“The questions where the students needed to reason their way through to an answer, rather than carrying out a calculation, turned out to be the most difficult.”

This aroused his interest in how students learn about science and engineering.

“The teachers themselves need a deep understanding of how formulae and reality relate to one another, and they need to feel secure in their roles as teachers in order for their students to feel secure. But when you understand something and can do it yourself, it can be easy to forget where the difficulty lay. Like remembering how you learned to ride a bike,” he points out.

Bernhard also wants to get away from the idea that transfer of information is the same as transfer of knowledge. A teacher explaining something is not the same thing as a student understanding it.

“The television teaching here at LiU in the 1970s is an example of this wrong thinking, and today we are seeing a trend whereby the major universities make recordings of lectures by their best researchers which are then disseminated worldwide. But a good teacher also needs to have a feeling for his auditorium, and to assess the level of knowledge,” he says, giving a horrific example:

One of his graduate students was giving a course to students when out of the blue she got a number of identical but completely incorrect answers to an exam question.  It turned out that the source was an online lecture from the United States that the students had told each other about.

“A critical view of sources is important and there are many people who maintain that a good teacher can teach anything since all the knowledge is on the web, but that is wrong too,” he maintains.

His own research, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council, looks at the role of technology in laboratory work. Students see reality through oscilloscopes, microscopes and other technology and what he is now studying is what they see and what they fail to understand. What is in focus and what remains in the background.

“This gives us important knowledge about learning, both for operators in industry and for people such as pilots, who have reality presented to them via different instruments.”

He also studies how learning can be made easy if the students do practical experiments where the results are represented and visualised in computers.

Bernhard was born and raised in Falun; his father was a chemical engineer who enjoyed sharing his knowledge and insights.  With the help of talented and well trained teachers at secondary school, he built an understanding of how concepts related to one another. He went to earn his master’s in Engineering Physics at Uppsala University, where he also took his PhD in magnetic spiral structures in cubic FeGe. 

But his interest in education and learning grew increasingly stronger, and after working for ten years as a lecturer at Dalarna University he came to Norrköping and Linköping University in 1999.

Since the middle of the 1990s he has been researching education; he was the one of the initiators of the Swedish National Graduate School in Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Research (FontD) and was also behind making Engineering Education a postgraduate education subject at LiU in 2004.

“It’s a really exciting area of research, but at the same time it is challenging as it is interdisciplinary. A deep technical knowledge of the subject is required, as are insights into how young people learn and how they look at the world, and a good deal of philosophy of engineering on top of that,” he says.

The research team at the Department of Science and Technology, Campus Norrköping, so far consists of Jonte Bernhard himself, a guest researcher, and a PhD student who will graduate in September. There is widespread international cooperation and a Nordic network is coordinated from Norrköping.

What does your professorship mean in concrete terms?

“The title of professor gives the work a great deal of legitimacy and is very significant in an international context.  I also hope that the professorship might lead to greater collaboration with teacher education at LiU and to the research team expanding.”

Jonte Bernhard is one of the twelve new professors who are inaugurated at the commencement ceremony on 17 May, 2013.

 

Related links

Jonte Bernhard’s website

Engineering Education Research Group, Department of Science and Technology, Campus Norrköping.

Monica Westman Svenselius Tue May 28 13:55:54 CEST 2013

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First professor of Engineering Education

Jonte Bernhard is Sweden’s first professor of Engineering Education, a relatively new research subject which is now spreading across the world. The knowledge of how students connect formulae to reality is central in his research.

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