What Sticks When the Dust Settles: Evaluating the Retention of Concepts and Thought Processes with Think-aloud Interviews
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual Conference
- Publication Date
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July 26, 2021
- Start Date
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July 26, 2021
- End Date
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July 19, 2022
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Educational Research and Methods
- Page Count
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12
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--38050
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/38050
- Download Count
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166
Paper Authors
Soheil Fatehiboroujeni
Cornell University
orcid.org/0000-0002-5129-7428
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.
Matthew Jordan Ford
Cornell University
orcid.org/0000-0002-1053-7149
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.
Hadas Ritz
Cornell University
orcid.org/0000-0002-5396-2962
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.
Elizabeth Mills Fisher Cornell University
Elizabeth M. Fisher is an Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell. She received her PhD from U.C. Berkeley.
Abstract
A foundational goal of deliberately designed educational experiences is for learners to acquire and to retain knowledge and thinking skills. Common modes of assessment such as exams administered during the semester may measure students’ short-term achievement of learning objectives. However, they do not identify the underlying knowledge gaps, misconceptions, or thought processes responsible for students’ errors. In addition, such tests do not yield information on students’ retention of skills beyond the conclusion of the course. Such limitations make it difficult to optimize learning activities for long-term retention of concepts and skills that are crucial to problem solving activities in engineering courses. Think-aloud interviews provide rich qualitative data about students' thought processes in verbal form that are not available from multiple-choice or free-response type of assessments. In this work-in-progress paper we present a set of think-aloud interviews with senior-level mechanical engineering students as they take a concept inventory assessment on introductory fluid mechanics and mechanics of engineering materials. Participants took these two courses in their junior year, at the end of which they took the same concept inventory tests, but not in a think-aloud format. We explain how our interview data is used to identify students’ knowledge gaps or misconceptions.
Fatehiboroujeni, S., & Ford, M. J., & Ritz, H., & Fisher, E. M. (2021, July), What Sticks When the Dust Settles: Evaluating the Retention of Concepts and Thought Processes with Think-aloud Interviews Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--38050
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