Development Of Kinesthetic Active Exercises For A Transport Phenomena Course
- Conference
- Location
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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2008
- Start Date
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June 22, 2008
- End Date
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June 25, 2008
- ISSN
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2153-5965
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Chemical Engineering
- Page Count
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15
- Page Numbers
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13.432.1 - 13.432.15
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--3762
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/3762
- Download Count
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749
Paper Authors
Allen White Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Allen White is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering; he co-developed and co-taught the kinesthetic active supplemental learning opportunities for this project. Alles educational research interests include engaging kinesthetic learners and project-based learning. Allen has 6 years of industrial experience at Honda of America Manufacturing and Honda R & D North America.
Glen Livesay Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Glen Livesay is an Associate Professor of Applied Biology and Biomedical Engineering; he co-developed and co-taught the kinesthetic active supplemental learning opportunities for this project. Glen’s educational research interests include student learning styles and the statistical evaluation of assessment instruments. He has received an NSF CAREER award, and served as the 2006 Fellow at the National Effective Teaching Institute.
Kay C Dee Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Kay C Dee is an Associate Professor of Applied Biology and Biomedical Engineering and the Founding Director of the Rose-Hulman Center for the Practice and Scholarship of Education. Kay C’s educational research interests include student learning styles, student evaluations of teaching, and faculty development. She served as the 2003 Fellow at the National Teaching Institute and has won a number of institutional and national awards for teaching.
Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract
Development of Kinesthetic Active Exercises for a Transport Phenomena Course
Abstract
Teaching techniques that provide hands-on experiences could be useful in helping all learners, but especially kinesthetic learners, to understand conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. Helping kinesthetic learners is of particular interest in engineering since many engineering students are kinesthetic learners. The focus of this work is a required sophomore course that teaches fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, statics, and dynamics by using conservation of mass, momentum, and energy equations. It has proven to be a challenging course for students, particularly those who are kinesthetically inclined, as it requires solving a variety of physical problems starting from governing equations. In order to improve student learning, a set of kinesthetic active exercises was created to help kinesthetic learners by connecting physical understanding to theory via directed experimental experience.
Student volunteers completed both the Index of Learning Styles and the VARK test to evaluate their learning style predisposition. Five one-hour-long experimental sessions were designed to provide a group of 25 students with hands-on learning experiences related to the conservation concepts covered during course lectures. The experiments were chosen to clarify the relationship between physical phenomena and their mathematical representations. Generally, in these sessions, students were given a brief description of the operation of a hands-on experiment or exercise, asked to predict the outcome, and then asked to perform the experiment and comment on the results. Pre- and post-sessions tests were administered in selected sessions to evaluate the effects of the exercises.
Preliminary assessment of this ongoing project indicates that the hands-on sessions are helping students learn conservation principles, the foundation of engineering. Scores on post-session tests were significantly (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon signed ranks test) higher than scores on pre-tests. Students with a preference for kinesthetic learning (on the VARK test) showed a larger change in pre- to post-session test scores than non-kinesthetic learners. Students with grade point averages in the range of 2.51 – 3.00 showed a larger change in pre- to post-session test scores than students in other ranges of grade point average, and female students showed a larger improvement from pre- to post-session scores than male students. The present work describes the instructional approach used to develop kinesthetic active exercises for the sessions, presents assessment results, and describes changes planned for the next iteration of this experiment.
White, A., & Livesay, G., & Dee, K. C. (2008, June), Development Of Kinesthetic Active Exercises For A Transport Phenomena Course Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--3762
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