2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

It has been well documented that students face difficulties in transferring their knowledge and skills learned in prior courses to other areas of the curriculum. These problems with transfer are exacerbated by foundational courses being taught outside the major, as well as the fact that many engineering courses are taught in silos, with little connection being made to the engineering curriculum as a whole. Work is needed to better enable students to see the connections between their courses and transfer the requisite knowledge and skills from prior classes to other areas of the curriculum, and in their careers.

This study builds on prior work (published at the ASEE Annual Conference last year) which used a series of think aloud, problem-solving interviews to assess the barriers and challenges students face in transferring knowledge from prior mathematics courses into an applied engineering setting. In this prior work, participants were tasked with solving a rigid body equilibrium problem typical of an engineering statics course but which required integration skills, as well as knowledge of the centroid, to solve. In the course of this study it was found that participants could not solve the problem as they could not determine the centroid of the object in question. Participants cited issues such as a lack of applied problems being taught that used centroids, the use of tabulated data for centroids, and forgetting governing equations as major barriers to being able to solve the problem. A majority of participants did however believe that being shown a general equation used to calculate centroids would have improved their problem solving success.

Grounded in the results of this prior study, two separate interventions designed to promote the transfer of knowledge and skills from prior courses were developed and tested with the goal of aiding students in determining the location of the centroid. In order to examine the potential effectiveness of these interventions, a series of (n=11) think aloud interviews were conducted based around the same statics problem as had previously been used. One of these interventions used a mathematical, equation-based-prompt in an attempt to promote knowledge transfer, while the other used a similar prompt but provided in a more applied, engineering context - in this case an excerpt from the notes made by the instructor of the department’s engineering statics class.

Findings suggested that an equation-based-prompt was largely unsuccessful at promoting problem solving success. The applied prompt based on prior course notes was more successful in enabling participants to solve the problem and find the centroid. It was unclear however if students truly understood the equations and methods presented in this prompt or whether they were simply able to correctly interpret the prompt and copy the pattern onto their solution. Persistent problems with (English) units and a lack of utilizing a formal problem solving method were also observed. A broader analysis of the study also suggests that students do not fully understand the conceptual underpinnings of the calculations used to determine the location of the centroid of an object.