2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In many introductory engineering courses, the fundamentals of documenting engineering calculations serve as an important learning outcome for the first-year students. Specifically, students are instructed on how to properly format an engineering calculation from writing a straightforward analysis on engineering graphing paper to assigning unique variable names to relevant physical quantities, among other concepts. In a large (100-150 students) first-year course at a public university, this topic had previously been taught via a traditional lecture method. In this traditional approach, expectations are first described to the students and then briefly demonstrated in several examples, and students are provided a written guide of the rules. This paper examines a new approach, in which students are instead provided with a problem statement accompanied by three instructor-generated solutions to that problem. The three solutions arrive at the same correct numerical answer, but contain varying levels of detail and clarity. Students were asked to identify the specific differences among the solutions and explain what made one solution more effective than another. As a class, the students developed the list of rules for engineering calculations based on their observations. Student performance on an engineering calculation homework assignment was compared between two semesters that each used the traditional approach and the new approach, respectively, to determine if the students fared better with one approach over the other.