2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Modified Concept Inventory for Dynamics

Presented at Assessing Conceptual Thinking about Engineering Mechanics

The Dynamics Concept Inventory (DCI) was developed approximately 20 years ago as a tool for instructors teaching Dynamics to assess their students’ gains in conceptual understanding of the material. Since its initial release, there have been hundreds of downloads of the DCI, and the initial paper presenting it has been referenced over 150 times. Although the DCI is an excellent tool for engineering mechanics instructors, the purpose of this study is to develop a second instrument that focuses primarily on rigid body dynamics concepts. Following advances in concept inventory development, we want to be sure each question concentrates on one concept and that there are three questions per concept. Contrary to the best practices of concept inventories, the DCI does not always have three questions per concept and some of its questions test more than one concept. The new concept inventory will identify concepts that do not overlap with established instruments that focus on particle dynamics such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). This inventory will provide new information on dynamics concepts that can complement the results from the other concept inventories. In this paper we will present preliminary work to develop a concept inventory for rigid body dynamics that has the following characteristics:
1. Three questions per concept.
2. No more than 9 or 10 concepts for a total of 27 or 30 questions.
3. No FCI questions.
4. Designed to facilitate making it adaptive in the future.

The original Delphi study used for the DCI was reexamined to identify the relevant concepts and the proposed questions will be developed during the 2023 Fall semester. We plan on deploying the instrument during the Spring of 2024 and develop an assessment plan to evaluate the draft questions for reliability and validity. The questions will eventually be tested at five different universities to examine the difficulty and discrimination indices, and limited think-aloud studies will be conducted. Questions will be deployed using the Concept Warehouse, which houses many candidate questions that may be considered for the new concept inventory.

Authors

Dr. Julian Ly Davis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4109-3904 University of Southern Indiana [biography]

Jul Davis is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana. He received his PhD in 2007 from Virginia Tech in Engineering Mechanics where he studied the vestibular organs in the inner ear using finite element models and vibration analyses. After graduating, he spent a semester teaching at a local community college and then two years at University of Massachusetts (Amherst) studying the biomechanics of biting in bats and monkeys, also using finite element modeling techniques. In 2010, he started his career teaching in all areas of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern Indiana. He loves teaching all of the basic mechanics courses, and of course his Vibrations and Finite Element Analysis courses.
Dr. Amie Baisley University of Florida [biography]

I am an Instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Florida teaching primarily 2nd year mechanics courses. My teaching and research interests are alternative pedagogies, mastery-based learning and assessment, student persistence in their first two years, and faculty development.
Dr. Geoffrey Recktenwald http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2003-4158 Michigan State University
Dr. Brian P. Self California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
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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