A close linkage between industry and educational institution can provide more chances for educational institution to understand the needs of industry and in turn provide students more job opportunities. In this study, a web-based remote controlled LED display panel project is provided by a company. The project students have to work hard and solve a lot of problems within a short period of time in order to meet several deadlines. Adding difficulty to this project is how to interface this LED display panel with products of another consultancy project. Several problems arise during the design process. These problems or criteria give project students a lot of challenge and enhance them to think deeper in order to solve these practical problems. This paper will describe this cooperative project and the challenge of student supervision. The difficulties that project students face during the whole process and how their thinking methods are improved after developing the LED display panel from this industrial collaboration project will also be reported.

The project entitled Higher Order Thinking Skills Targeted for University First-Year (HOTSTUF) was the concerted and coordinated efforts of teaching and non-teaching staff of a liberal arts university to stimulate, foster, and enhance higher-order thinking of two cohorts of first-year university students during the two-year duration of the project. The project aimed at creating a learning environment that was conducive to developing a culture of thinking, particularly thinking skills and good thinking dispositions. To achieve this objective, a series of programs subsumed under the four-component framework of the project were organized: (A) Thinking-in-Action Program, (B) Thinking-in-Operation Workshops, (C) Websites for Integrative Thinking, and (D) Formative and Summative Documentation, This paper briefly describes the diversity and scope of the programs of these components, the impact of these programs on the student participants, and the limitations of the project.

The School of Design has been providing a design subject for engineering students since 1998. The subject aims at enriching students' experience in creative thinking, as well other design activities. Through project activities, each student attending the subject is required to initiate a design idea, and later to put the idea into practice. The first evaluation of the subject was conducted in 1999. The results show that engineering students, who normally tackle problems pre-defmed by teachers/supervisors or with only limited choices, find it difficult to initiate "creative" ideas without a direction and well- defined scope. Thus, in 1999/2000, instead of designing and innovating objects without any guidelines or boundaries, or, on the contrary, being provided with fixed/limited topics, the students were encouraged to respect cultures and users' practices in order to identify needs and opportunities, and then develop their ideas. The results of the subject evaluation in 2000 indicate that respecting cultures and users' practices is a good direction and scope set for students to carry out creativity activities, particularly for those students without much experience in initiating creative ideas. On the one hand, it allows students a certain degree of guidance in initiating ideas. On the other hand, it does not limit the possibility for students to initiate and develop their ideas, as "cultures and users' practices" is a dynamic everyday life topic which allows students much flexibility to investigate and explore, and a good basis for generating ideas. This paper explains the concept of respecting cultures and users' practice, and the rationale underlying student creativity activities. By illustrating some of the students' work and the results of evaluations, the paper discusses the advantages and limitations of this kind of idea initiation activities for students in general and for engineering students in particular.

Learning environment's conditions and combinations of various motivation factors could have serious impact upon students' learning behaviours and attitudes. Considerable effort has been expended in attempting to improve teachers' teaching skills, students' learning techniques and teacher-student interaction, as greater understanding of the key attributes of effective teaching and learning could re-vitalise the existing education system. In view of this, a survey was conducted to identify factors which influence the effectiveness of a learning process. This article focuses on the analysis of some Hygiene factors and Motivation factors which are considered important to engineering students, and which can have a positive impact on their learning. Understanding the influence of such factors can give educational institutions insights into aspects of their students' behaviour and help them to improve the learning environment.

A primary goal of education is to assist students to become independent learners and thinkers. The importance of assisting students to develop as independent learners has become more apparent in recent times as the nature, availability and quantity of knowledge has changed. In one vision of the future, Toffler (1970) suggested that what counted for today's knowledge would be tomorrow's misinformation and that in times of rapid information expansion and social change an enormous premium would be placed on people's learnng efficiency. A key variable in people's learning efficiency is their metacognition, that is, their knowledge, awareness and control of their learning processes. This paper uses existing theoretical perspectives in addition to completed and ongoing research into students' metacognition and the psychosocial orientations of classrooms in which interventions have taken place and identifies eight attributes of classroom learning environments that influence the development and enhancement of metacognition. Initial findings from an instrument constructed from expressions of these attributes has provided insights into the metacognitive orientation of science classrooms that are consistent with what is already known from available research.