2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite existing literature showing the benefits of teaching practices focused on conceptual understanding in engineering classrooms, the aerospace engineering space has been slow to adapt to these teaching practices. The purpose of this case study is to explore and analyze junior-year aerospace engineering students’ conceptual understanding of Static Stability and Control. Moreover, this research aims to identify elements of a Flight Mechanics course and how those elements can affect students’ conceptual understanding. Participants were 24 junior engineering students enrolled in the Air Vehicle Dynamics course. To measure conceptual understanding, participants were tasked with creating a concept map that described the topic of Static Stability and Control. Using cluster analysis, these concept maps were categorized into common mental models. Following Vosniadou’s Framework Theory, three levels of mental models present in the classroom were identified: initial, synthetic, and scientific mental models. Results from this research indicate that formal instruction expects students to have some level of expertise from prior courses to properly synthesize the information presented in class. Moreover, the study found that most of the students’ mental models existed within the boundaries of the mental model presented by the formal instruction. This alignment showed the effectiveness of providing students with clear lecture notes and with different representations of important concepts during lectures. This research contributes to the field of engineering education by expanding conceptual understanding research into the higher education space and to the field of aerospace engineering by highlighting potential areas of improvement for aerospace engineering courses.