2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

From passive instruction to highly collaborative active learning, student success can vary in the classroom based on a variety of factors. Within different possible learning constructs, how the class environment, or climate, is structured can make a significant impact on a student being successful. When developing or adopting new classroom pedagogical approaches, both faculty and student perspectives need to be considered and understood better. To better understand the impact of varying levels of active learning from the student perspective, this research looked at the classroom environment by assessing it with the established College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI). The focus of this project in this paper centers on a single instructor that has varied the active learning techniques across a steel design class and a computer modeling class. To see if, and to what extent, active learning made climate improvements, data from before and after active learning adoption were compared. The CUCEI compares these climates on seven psychosocial dimensions of classroom: personalization, involvement, student cohesiveness, satisfaction, task orientation, innovation, and individualization. This paper explore how climate changes between traditional and active delivery, does the quantity of active learning change the climate, and lastly, is there a relationship between climate and student achievement.

Results from the data has shown that climate perspectives do not necessarily increase or could possibly decrease when active learning is deployed. While much of the data was inclusive due to sample sizes and a lack of statistical evidence, there were still several observed trends that provides rich insights. First, the steel course has some unique instances compared to the modeling class. For the steel design class 4 psychosocial dimensions can predict grades while for computer modeling only 2 predict data. Within steel design the most important climate characteristics for success is students enjoy going class and know exactly what has to be done and they let students decide some of the metrics. At the same time instructor’s need to be interested in students' problems while giving. For computer modeling this shifts to the level of instructor support to help in class and give ample opportunity to pursue interests.