Actualizing Students' Prior Knowledge in Engineering Education

This research aims to mitigate the inhibiting factors that prevent faculty and students from excelling in their roles in engineering education. The approach focuses on the identification and subsequent usage of "prior knowledge" one accumulates perpetually with the passage of time. The approach is expected to help students and faculty alike to share their under-utilized knowledge bank in a structured manner and correlate it with the subject matter under study. Such an analogical-bridging triggers a thinking process that facilitates transfer and learning of new knowledge through mechanisms of assimilation and accommodation. The concept of analogical bridging has been explained with examples that can be bench marked for variety of subjects. Application of this approach to diverse academic disciplines indicates suitability and effectiveness of the concept, and is expected to produce desired results in improving general understanding of the discipline among students. As such, the approach is deemed to be cost-effective, and complements the existing instructional and educational approaches. It therefore merits consideration for adoption.