Engineering Elements between First Year and Final Year Engineering Students in Malaysia

Earlier studies indicated that there are four main engineering elements which are inquiry, design, optimisation and sustainability. The further sub-classification includes 10 sub-elements: interest, discovery, inquisitive mind, imagination, problem solving, prototyping, optimising, maintaining, life cycle and sustainable values. An instrument to measure these engineering elements was developed and piloted to 280 engineering students with a high reliability value of 0.9142 using the Cronbach's reliability test. The validated questionnaire called Engineering Elements Survey (EES) was administered to 816 first year and final year engineering students from five higher education institutions in Malaysia enrolled in various fields of engineering programmes. From the means of all the sub-elements, there is a consistent pattern showing that first year engineering students have lower scores compared to the final year engineering students.