I have been involved in a number of educational research projects aimed at improving the delivery and effectivenes of engineering undergraduate courses in mechanics the most recent of which concerned the development of a Concept Inventory for undergraduate dynamics courses, which focused my interest in the quantitative assessment of the conceptual understanding of engineering students.
In this current project, which was developed by Prof. Thomas A. Litzinger in the Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering Department here at Penn State, I am helping with the development of tests and questions aiming at understanding the development of problem solving skills in students taking the undergraduate statics course.
In spite of instructors' best efforts, most students in introductory engineering courses such as Statics, Dynamics, Thermodynamics, and Signals & Circuits come away from these courses seeing problem solving as the application of a multitude of problem-specific recipes as opposed to a coherent, systematic process. Some of the causes behind the students' view of problem solving as recipe application likely involve our textbooks and teaching methods. However, other causes certainly lie in the fact that learning to do problem solving is a cognitively challenging task. The proposed work is designed to determine the major cognitive challenges that students face as they begin to learn to be engineering problem solvers and to develop pedagogical methods and tools to accelerate their progress toward a coherent, more expert-like view of the problem solving process.
Clearly the scope of this problem is quite large, so we have chosen to focus our efforts on critical early steps in the process of problem solving, which we refer to as 'modeling' the problem. Here we use the term modeling to encompass two processes–transforming the problem statement into an engineering representation, and then translating that engineering representation to a mathematical one. To further narrow the focus of the research we will study students in Statics and Dynamics courses as they learn to create free-body diagrams and to apply the governing equations to solve problems. The major methods used to study the students' performance and abilities are "Growth Curve Modeling" and "Think-aloud Problem Solving" interviews. The Growth Curve Modeling study will assess the basic abilities and modeling skills of large numbers of students using a number of measures including concept inventories and a visualization test. The Think-aloud interviews will involve smaller numbers of students who will be videotaped as they perform modeling for Statics and Dynamics Problems; the protocol for analysis of the Think-aloud sessions was developed in pilot studies with students creating free-body diagrams for Statics problems.
As the results of the analysis of these two sources of data come to be available, they will be discussed in depth with instructors of Statics and Dynamics courses, who are Co-PI's on this project. The full cross-disciplinary team of Engineering and Educational Psychology faculty will then decide what types of interventions are most likely to effect the required changes to accelerate students' progress toward expert-like behavior. These interventions will be implemented in small scale 'Design Experiments' and the best will be used in a full scale implementation with a formal Experimental Design.