In this paper, we propose a method to analyse the coherence of existing curricula at higher education institution. We focus our attention to engineering programmes at universities but the proposed method is by no means restricted to those cases. In contrast to other known methods, our approach is quantitative, decentralised, and asynchronous and allows to analyse entire programmes (in contrast to single courses) and does not depend on using specific teaching methods or tools. We propose to perform this quantitative assessment in two steps: first, representing the university programme as an opportune graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as edges; second, analysing the structure of the programme using methods from graph theory. We thus perform two investigations, both leveraging a practical case – data collected from three engineering programmes at two Swedish universities: (a) how to represent university programmes in terms of graphs (here called concepts-courses graph (CCG)) and (b) how to reinterpret the most classical graph-theoretical node centrality indexes and connectivity and network flow results in order to analyse the programme structure, including to discover flows and mismatches.

This paper investigates methods for quantitatively assessing the importance and relative importance of concepts taught in a university program. This assessment has many uses, e.g., to aid program design and inventory, and for communicating what concepts a course may rely on at a given point in the program. We propose to perform this quantitative assessment in two steps: first, representing the university program as an opportune graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as edges; second, by quantitatively defining each concept's importance as its centrality as a node within the network. We thus perform two investigations, both leveraging a practical case - data collected from two engineering programs at two Swedish university: a) how to represent university programs in terms of graphs (here called Courses-Concepts Graph (CCG)), and b) how to reinterpret the most classical graph-theoretical node centrality indexes in the pedagogical term of concept centrality index.

This paper investigates methods for quantitatively examining the connectivity and knowledge flow in a university program considering courses and concepts included in the program. The proposed method is expected to be useful to aid program design and inventory, and for communicating what concepts a course may rely on at a given point in the program. As a first step, we represent the university program as a directed graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as directed edges. Then, we investigate the connectivity and the flow through the graph in order to gain insights into the structure of the program. We thus perform two investigations based on data collected from an engineering program at a Swedish university: a) how to represent (parts of) the university program as a graph (here called Directed Courses-Concepts Graph (DCCG)), and b) how to use graph theory tools to analyse the coherence and structure of the program.

This paper suggests a method for developing, implementing and assessing a concept inventory test for electrical engineering students (CITE). The aim of this test is to help students better understand and learn core concepts, plus increase their awareness about links between the different courses and other themes of the program. Our and other experiences show that students often struggle to understand and use fundamental concepts, and how these relate to the various courses. This issue is probably due to the fact that traditional exams mainly focus on assessing procedural tasks (e.g., directly solving specific problems following step-by-step approaches). The investigated programs at Uppsala University (UU) and Luleå Uni-versity of Technology (LTU), nonetheless, have no tool for collecting quantitative data on how students develop conceptual knowledge throughout the programs, and thus no means to obtain an holistic view about their learning process. The here proposed methodology thus describes how to develop tests that would not only provide students with valuable feedback on their progression, but also equip teachers and program boards with high-end data for pedagogical and course development purposes. Besides illustrating the developmental methodology, the paper includes reactions and remarks from students on what the tests would provide and what would motivate them to take it.

Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in order to investigate how teenagers respond to a text which is strongly focalised through a single character. The students were asked to rewrite the events in the story from another character’s point of view. Their texts were coded and analysed, as were follow-up interviews with six students. The findings indicate that Swedish-speaking teenage readers rarely have difficulty resisting focalisation, but they often struggle with irony.