Expectations of Student Engaged in Tertiary Education on Engineering Courses from Their Teachers of Choice

Abstract

Although several learning theories ranging from behaviourism to cognitive to humanistic education have been proposed to choose the appropriate effective teaching models, none can be applied across the board to all learners in all situations; nevertheless some commonalities emerge. A combination of pedagogical and andragogical, “middle of the road” approaches meet the need of a larger segment of the audience. Our experiences and many surveys confirmed that the theory of behaviourism may be well suitable to first and second year students and the cognitive approach may be well fit to third and fourth year students. Only for supervising final year project work, based on the theory of teachers and students working together, humanistic may be adoptable. The survey was conducted among the students enrolled for engineering courses in Curtin University, Sarawak to assess the grade of importance on twelve basic aspects of knowledge, communication skill and planning potentials expected from the teachers.This paper describes the analysis of the action survey results and summaries of the recommendations for effective teaching. The survey concludes that each well defined lecture arranged in right sequences should be orally presented in a simple constructive language with the consistent flow speed optimum suitable to majority of the audience for better learning outcomes. Language proficiency and fluency are not the barriers for successful teaching to multicultural classroom in tertiary education. It concludes that “Teachers of student choice” are not born but they are trained by acquiring the required relevant knowledge and sincere practice of delivering the lectures in an optimum suitable way to the audience for effective learning.