Faculty
Dr. Saleh Al Hashimi
Assistant Professor
Bu Hasa Building, Room 2205
Sas Al Nakhl Campus
Office: +971 2 607 5222
Fax: +971 2 607 5200
Email: salhashimi@pi.ac.ae |
|
- BS, MS, PhD, Tufts University
Most Chemical engineers will agree that a Chemical Process is very dependent on what occurs in the reactor and that the reactor conditions greatly determines the nature and operating conditions of other units in that same process. It is therefore natural for many researchers to focus on the reactor and endeavor to come up with better catalysts and new routes for the synthesis of even the most basic of chemicals. My interests are mainly in the fields of Reaction Engineering, Process Development and Control and Process Optimization.
The Petroleum Institute’s students are mostly males who graduated from public schools of the United Arab Emirates. Therefore they go through a transition as they get used to the American style of learning. The students respond differently to this learning environment than students in the U.S.A. It is therefore important to understand how our students are different than their peers in the U.S.A. in terms of the way they learn, think and respond. There may also be a cultural and linguistic effect embedded in these differences.
This has prompted us at the PI to undergo some preliminary research in this area. We started by using The Force Concept Inventory (FCI), which is one of the earliest and most widely used concept tests in physics. According to its authors, this multiple choice test is “designed to assess student understanding of the most basic concepts in Newtonian mechanics.” David Hestenes, the developer of the FCI, and his colleagues have published widely about its use as have others, most notably Richard Hake. We translated a version to Arabic and monitored this test randomly to PI students. We compared the results of the PI students to that of their peers in the United States and attempted to explain why the results were statistically significant. This has pushed us to undergo more research that will help us identify better methods that could enrich the learning environment in our classes.
