A low-cost materials laboratory sequence for remote instruction that supports student agency

Matthew Jordan Ford; Soheil Fatehiboroujeni; Hadas Ritz

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Conference: 2021 ASEE St. Lawrence Section Conference
Location: Virtual
Publication Date: April 17, 2021
Start Date: April 17, 2021
End Date: April 17, 2021
Page Count: 3
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--38290
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/38290
Download Count: 318

Paper Authors

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Matthew Jordan 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 a postdoc with the Cornell Active Learning Initiative, he joined the School of Engineering and Technology at UW Tacoma to help start a brand-new mechanical engineering program. 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” (ABET 2019). This outcome must be operationalized and assessed in the form of concrete performance indicators. 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 (Holmes, et. al. 2018). At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to move to virtual and geographically distributed learning.

To address these challenges we developed a series of online materials testing labs for an upper-division mechanics of materials course. The first three labs consist of video demonstrations of traditional lab experiments coupled with group discussions and data analysis. Two of these “traditional” virtual labs are supplemented with generative activities in which students recreate and demonstrate standard mechanical tests with household items in a peer-teaching video format. 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 an aluminum specimen that they prepare themselves and use their results to design a hypothetical product made of the same material. In order to provide the same opportunity for students around the world, the test specimen is taken from a standard aluminum beverage can.

One measure of whether or not an activity supports student agency is the diversity of solutions generated by students (Willner-Giwerc et. al., 2020). We analyzed all 44 reports from the final guided-inquiry lab and coded the experimental procedure on five critical decisions including the type of experiment performed, geometry of the specimen, loading method, measurement method, and additional strategies used for increasing measurement precision. We identified 31 unique approaches to the problem, with no one approach accounting for more than three submissions.

Student outcomes were measured by a short survey of students’ feelings of agency 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 control increased dramatically between the “traditional” labs and the guided-inquiry lab: from 51% to 81% for goal-setting and from about 67% to 93% for choice of methods. Students’ 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). While a true control group does not exist for this study, the increase in targeted skills coupled with the lack of increase in important-sounding but non-targeted generic skills provides some evidence for the effectiveness of the guided-inquiry intervention.

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

Citation
Format

Ford, M. J., & Fatehiboroujeni, S., & Ritz, H. (2021, April), A low-cost materials laboratory sequence for remote instruction that supports student agency Paper presented at 2021 ASEE St. Lawrence Section Conference, Virtual. 10.18260/1-2--38290

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” (ABET 2019). This outcome must be operationalized and assessed in the form of concrete performance indicators. 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 (Holmes, et. al. 2018). At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to move to virtual and geographically distributed learning.

To address these challenges we developed a series of online materials testing labs for an upper-division mechanics of materials course. The first three labs consist of video demonstrations of traditional lab experiments coupled with group discussions and data analysis. Two of these “traditional” virtual labs are supplemented with generative activities in which students recreate and demonstrate standard mechanical tests with household items in a peer-teaching video format. 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 an aluminum specimen that they prepare themselves and use their results to design a hypothetical product made of the same material. In order to provide the same opportunity for students around the world, the test specimen is taken from a standard aluminum beverage can.

One measure of whether or not an activity supports student agency is the diversity of solutions generated by students (Willner-Giwerc et. al., 2020). We analyzed all 44 reports from the final guided-inquiry lab and coded the experimental procedure on five critical decisions including the type of experiment performed, geometry of the specimen, loading method, measurement method, and additional strategies used for increasing measurement precision. We identified 31 unique approaches to the problem, with no one approach accounting for more than three submissions.

Student outcomes were measured by a short survey of students’ feelings of agency 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 control increased dramatically between the “traditional” labs and the guided-inquiry lab: from 51% to 81% for goal-setting and from about 67% to 93% for choice of methods. Students’ 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). While a true control group does not exist for this study, the increase in targeted skills coupled with the lack of increase in important-sounding but non-targeted generic skills provides some evidence for the effectiveness of the guided-inquiry intervention.

Our experience demonstrates that at-home lab activities can achieve sophisticated learning outcomes without the use of lab equipment or expensive standardized kits.
AU - Matthew Jordan Ford
AU - Soheil Fatehiboroujeni
AU - Hadas Ritz
CY - Virtual
DA - 2021/04/17
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - A low-cost materials laboratory sequence for remote instruction that supports student agency
UR - https://peer.asee.org/38290
DO - 10.18260/1-2--38290
ER -