2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Different Teaching Styles and the Impacts on Test Design for Dynamics

Presented at Unique Pedagogies for Mechanics Education

The pedagogical design of a classroom, including the class environment, assessment methods, and learning outcomes, impacts everything that students do and learn in that course. There are many different methods of teaching that have emerged and been explored in engineering classrooms in recent years such as flipped classrooms, repeated testing, courses with in-class hands-on activities, and also many courses that continue to be taught in a lecture-based environment. Undergraduate Dynamics is one of the standard engineering courses for many engineering majors where the content is well established and has not changed in decades; however, the implementation of different teaching styles has had an impact on the way the material is presented and covered in the class. Through discussion amongst three instructors at different universities with different teaching styles they discovered notable differences in how each instructor writes, solves, and evaluates their course problems in undergraduate Dynamics. The three teaching styles include (1) a flipped, recitation-based classroom that uses a mastery-based derivation approach to solving problems, (2) a lecture style class using the SMART Assessment approach, and (3) a lecture style class with 3 levels of student participation worked into the class to engage both reflective and active learners. The instructors chose several standard dynamics problems to analyze, where each instructor tailored the problem statement for their course and included how they would require the students to solve the problem and how they would evaluate the solution. These problems will be assigned for future exams in each instructor’s class, graded in their own style, and then evaluated as a team to assess student learning outcomes. This work-in-progress paper will present the differences in the style of the problem statement, solution, and evaluation for some of these dynamics problems.

Authors

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. 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. Geoffrey Recktenwald http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2003-4158 Michigan State University [biography]

Geoff Recktenwald is a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University. Geoff holds a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University and Bachelor degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from Cedarville University. His research interests are focused on best practices for student learning and student success. He is currently developing and researching SMART assessment, a modified mastery learning pedagogy for problem based courses. He created a multi-year integrated system design (ISD) project for mechanical engineering students. He is a mentor to mechanical engineering graduate teaching fellows and actively champions the adoption and use of teaching technologies.

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