2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

English as a foreign language (EFL) students encounter a diverse set of learning challenges due to inherent cultural barriers, like English language communication and misconstrued behaviors from non-verbal communication. Engineering courses involve complex subject matter with nuanced concepts and are commonly structured with prerequisite courses. This requires EFL students to have a proficient level of academic preparation and foundational knowledge. All these factors compound the learning challenge that EFL students must overcome to persist and complete an online engineering course that is taught in English.
The present paper builds on a previous work where a pedagogy with a lean instructional methodology was developed for EFL students in an online Mechanics of Materials course (82% asynchronous and 18% synchronous). The lean methodology relied on reduced question sets for homework, a guided mapping of key technical terms, and alternative text explanations for problem figures. These instructional materials were designed to decrease the student’s cognitive load and establish a toolkit to support their learning. The results of the initial deployment showed an increase in student engagement. However, it was inconclusive whether the homework completion grade was affected by the pedagogy. The results also showed that the homework had a weak positive correlation with exam performance.
The present paper further aims to assess the efficacy of the pedagogy by examining student engagement and student performance across multiple cohorts of the course. Learning management system tools, like chat and polling, were previously shown to be effective qualitative methods for overcoming the passive learning behavior exhibited by EFL students. Thus, a comparison by cohort and in aggregate were performed for the following: student participation at each synchronous Q&A session using the chat feature, student polling throughout the semester (before, during, after), homework grade data, and exam grade data. Student engagement increased 17% in Cohort 2022 compared to 2021, which validated the support for using chat and polling. Students reported in polling that they needed the lean methodology more as the semester progressed even though homework performance wasn’t positively impacted. It was also found that students relied on the lean methodology to complete the midterm and final exams. An analysis of both HW 1 and HW 2 revealed a statistically significant performance benefit in homework assignments by using the lean methodology with a moderate to large effect.