Job opportunity: Postdoc: Epistemological Development in Engineering Education Systems

TU/e is looking for a new enthusiastic candidate to fulfil the vacancy for a Postdoc “Understanding Epistemological Development in Engineering Education Systems”.

Job description

Are you fascinated about human thinking? And about how technical universities should support epistemological development with education? In this postdoc, you will study and advise “challenge-based learning” design with an emphasis on epistemological development in the educational system including students, teachers and professionals.

This project focusses on the thinking part. It starts from epistemological development theories in educational sciences that state that (1) students grow in their thinking throughout their higher education from absolute (rationalist) to contextual (constructivist) thinkers; and that (2) this contextual thinking is progress (thus, better) in general, and better for the societal role of future engineers in particular. The latter is said to be so because contextual thinking is considered to leave more room for the connection between engineering facts with individual values and societal norms.

The specific tasks of the Postdoc candidate include:

• Critically analyze foundations of the epistemological development concept and the related theories.
• Develop own quantitative measurement of epistemological development to add to the theory.
• Empirically analyze how the interactions in the entire educational system, between students, teachers and professionals in CBL, support absolute and/or contextual thinking.
• Study the effect of specific characteristics of CBL on epistemological development of students, teachers and professionals and co-design CBL to improve it.