A Low-cost Materials Laboratory Sequence for Remote Instruction that Supports Student Agency

Matthew J. Ford; Soheil Fatehiboroujeni; Hadas Ritz

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Conference: 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
Location: Virtual Conference
Publication Date: July 26, 2021
Start Date: July 26, 2021
End Date: July 19, 2022
Conference Session: Thermal Fluid Experiment Related
Tagged Division: Mechanical Engineering
Page Count: 12
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--36591
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/36591
Download Count: 366

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Paper Authors

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Matthew J. Ford Cornell University orcid.org/0000-0002-1053-7149

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Matthew Ford received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and materials science from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to complete his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. After completing an internship in quantitative methods for education research with the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), he joined the Cornell Active Learning Initiative as a postdoctoral associate. His teaching interests include solid mechanics, engineering design, and inquiry-guided learning.

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Soheil Fatehiboroujeni Cornell University orcid.org/0000-0002-5129-7428

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Soheil Fatehiboroujeni received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Merced in 2018. As a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Soheil is working in the Active Learning Initiative to promote student learning and the use of computational tools such as Matlab and ANSYS in the context of fluid mechanics and heat transfer.

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Hadas Ritz Cornell University orcid.org/0000-0002-5396-2962

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Hadas Ritz is a senior lecturer in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a Faculty Teaching Fellow at the James McCormick Family Teaching Excellence Institute (MTEI) at Cornell University, where she received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2008. Since then she has taught required and elective courses covering a wide range of topics in the undergraduate Mechanical Engineering curriculum. In her work with MTEI she co-leads teaching workshops for new faculty and assists with other teaching excellence initiatives. Her main teaching interests include solid mechanics and engineering mathematics. Among other teaching awards, she received the 2021 ASEE National Outstanding Teaching Award.

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Abstract

Under the new ABET accreditation framework, students are expected to demonstrate “an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions.” Traditional, recipe-based labs provide few opportunities for students to engage in realistic experimental design, and recent research has cast doubt on their pedagogical benefit. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to move to remote learning.

To address these challenges we developed a series of online labs for an upper-division mechanics of materials course. The first three labs consist of video demonstrations of traditional lab experiments with synchronous group discussions and data analysis. Two of these “traditional” virtual labs are supplemented with peer-teaching video activities. The final lab is a guided-inquiry activity focused on experimental design. Using only materials available at home, students measure the Young’s modulus of aluminum and use their results to design a hypothetical product. In order to provide the same opportunity for students around the world, the test specimen is taken from an aluminum beverage can.

One measure of whether or not an activity supports student agency is the diversity of solutions generated by students. We analyzed 36 reports from the final guided-inquiry lab and coded the experimental procedure on five key decisions such as the type of experiment performed, specimen geometry, and measurement method. We identified 29 unique approaches to the problem, with no one approach accounting for more than three submissions.

Student outcomes were measured by a survey of students’ attitudes and self-efficacy administered directly after every lab activity except for the first one. The fraction of students endorsing statements related to a sense of agency increased dramatically between the “traditional” labs and the guided-inquiry lab: from 52% to 82% for goal-setting and from about 64% to 92% for choice of methods. Self-efficacy increased significantly in the primary targeted skills (designing experiments, making predictions, and generating further questions), but there was no significant shift in skills not explicitly targeted by the guided-inquiry lab (equitable sharing of labor, expressing opinions in a group, and interpreting graphs).

Our experience demonstrates that at-home lab activities can achieve sophisticated learning outcomes without the use of lab equipment or customized kits.

Citation
Format

Ford, M. J., & Fatehiboroujeni, S., & Ritz, H. (2021, July), A Low-cost Materials Laboratory Sequence for Remote Instruction that Supports Student Agency Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--36591

TY - CPAPER
AB - Under the new ABET accreditation framework, students are expected to demonstrate “an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions.” Traditional, recipe-based labs provide few opportunities for students to engage in realistic experimental design, and recent research has cast doubt on their pedagogical benefit. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to move to remote learning.

To address these challenges we developed a series of online labs for an upper-division mechanics of materials course. The first three labs consist of video demonstrations of traditional lab experiments with synchronous group discussions and data analysis. Two of these “traditional” virtual labs are supplemented with peer-teaching video activities. The final lab is a guided-inquiry activity focused on experimental design. Using only materials available at home, students measure the Young’s modulus of aluminum and use their results to design a hypothetical product. In order to provide the same opportunity for students around the world, the test specimen is taken from an aluminum beverage can.

One measure of whether or not an activity supports student agency is the diversity of solutions generated by students. We analyzed 36 reports from the final guided-inquiry lab and coded the experimental procedure on five key decisions such as the type of experiment performed, specimen geometry, and measurement method. We identified 29 unique approaches to the problem, with no one approach accounting for more than three submissions.

Student outcomes were measured by a survey of students’ attitudes and self-efficacy administered directly after every lab activity except for the first one. The fraction of students endorsing statements related to a sense of agency increased dramatically between the “traditional” labs and the guided-inquiry lab: from 52% to 82% for goal-setting and from about 64% to 92% for choice of methods. Self-efficacy increased significantly in the primary targeted skills (designing experiments, making predictions, and generating further questions), but there was no significant shift in skills not explicitly targeted by the guided-inquiry lab (equitable sharing of labor, expressing opinions in a group, and interpreting graphs).

Our experience demonstrates that at-home lab activities can achieve sophisticated learning outcomes without the use of lab equipment or customized kits.
AU - Matthew J. Ford
AU - Soheil Fatehiboroujeni
AU - Hadas Ritz
CY - Virtual Conference
DA - 2021/07/26
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - A Low-cost Materials Laboratory Sequence for Remote Instruction that Supports Student Agency
UR - https://strategy.asee.org/36591
DO - 10.18260/1-2--36591
ER -