2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Effect of a Required Core Mechanics Course on Student Mindset

Presented at Understanding the Student Experience in Mechanics Courses

In this study, we will be examining how a required engineering course, Mechanical Engineering 220 – Fundamentals of Mechanics (ME 220), at the United States Air Force Academy influences student mindset. ME 220 is the first of many STEM courses that all students, both engineering and non-engineering majors, are required to take at USAFA. For this study, students were given a mindset questionnaire the first week of class and at the end of the course. It was hoped that students’ experiences in the course would help them develop a stronger growth mindset. Unfortunately, the students’ average mindset rating actually decreased from the pre-class to the post-class questionnaire. What still needs to be investigated, however, is whether this result is due to students’ fatigue at the end of the semester or due to some other reason.

Authors

Dr. Phillip Cornwell United States Air Force Academy [biography]

Phillip Cornwell is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 and his present interests include structural dynamics, structural health monitoring, and undergraduate engineering education. Dr. Cornwell has received an SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award in 1992, and the Dean’s Outstanding Teacher award at Rose-Hulman in 2000, the Rose-Hulman Board of Trustee’s Outstanding Scholar Award in 2001, and the Archie Higdon Distinguished Educator Award in 2019 from the Mechanics Division of ASEE. He was one of the developers of the Rose-Hulman Sophomore Engineering Curriculum, the Dynamics Concept Inventory, and he is a co-author of Vector Mechanics for Engineers: Dynamics, by Beer, Johnston, Cornwell, and Self.

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