Abstracts - Earli

Relationships between students’ strategies to influence their study environment and their studyachievements and approaches to studyingTomas Jungert, Department of Behavioural Sciences, SwedenMichael Rosander, Department of Behavioural Sciences, SwedenThe aim of this study is to explore the relationships between the strategies that engineeringstudents in a Swedish context use in order to influence their study environment and their academicachievements and their strategic approaches to studying. The Swedish Higher Educational contexthas a distinguishing characteristic in the Swedish students’ statutory rights to influence their studyenvironment by various means. Participants were 90 students enrolled in the third and fifthsemester of a Masters programme in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. Data wascollected by means of two questionnaires; the first questionnaire, which was distributed to thestudents in class during their first week of the semester, measured the students’ degrees of strategicapproach to studying, while the second questionnaire, which was distributed in class six weeksinto the semester, asked about what strategies students usually use to influence their studyenvironment and what strategies they had used during the recent week. A factor analysis withVarimax rotation of the nine items of strategy to influence resulted in three factors explaining 61% of the variance. The factors were extracted using a principal component analysis. The threefactors indicate that there are three categories of strategies to influence the study environment; ahorizontal strategy, whereby students seek support from peers to influence, a vertical strategywhereby students try to influence their teachers, and a passive strategy, whereby only mostlystatutory means of influencing were used. Relationships between strategies to influence andacademic achievement will be analysed at the end of the semester. Findings of the second aimshow that strategic approach to studying and its sub-scale levels time management and monitoringeffectiveness were associated with a vertical strategy to influence the study environment, while thesub-scale level achieving was associated with a passive strategy to influence their studies.Methodology in information systems development: An online forum within a hybrid graduatecourseDov Dori, Technion, IsraelMeaningful learning takes place when students are actively engaged in exploration of andargumentation about the subject matter under study. To attain such meaningful learning, thegraduate/undergraduate elective course "Methodologies in Information Systems Development"was conducted as a hybrid course. This course was aimed primarily at Information SystemsEngineering students and its goal was to study and practice methods, approaches and techniquesfor developing complex systems in the areas related to systems engineering and informationtechnology. The course combined bi-weekly face-to-face class sessions interleaved with tutorialsand five-day periods of online forum discussions and required the students to work in teams. Eachteam had to read an assigned paper or chapter, open a discussion in the online forum, respond backto students’ answers, and present summary and conclusions in class. The assumption was that thisgraduate course can potentially improve learning processes compared with traditional learning andWeb-based learning. The educational value students gained from the active learning that tookplace in this course will be demonstrated by insightful examples of the vivid discussions thatdeveloped in the online forum and the feedback students provided on this hybrid course format.Students welcomed this fresh mode of teaching, feeling they covered a lot of ground while stillexperiencing meaningful and overall enjoyable learning via teamwork. Main points forimprovement, as reported by the students, include higher staff involvement in the online forum,clearer definitions of the time constraints, a short introduction to each topic prior to the forum– 849 –