2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering students tend to focus more on achieving high grades than actually learning and comprehending course material. Failures during the undergraduate curriculum can motivate students to learn in addition to building resiliency, humility and grit among other positive traits. Recent efforts to development entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students aims to motivate failure tolerance, but the high stakes assessments typically used in courses don’t normally provide students a chance to practice or demonstrate an ability to learn from failures. Alternatively, mastery-based learning can shift students from a grade-driven mentality to a learning-oriented mindset. In mastery-based learning, final grades are determined from the total number of skills mastered by the end of the semester. As part of the learning process, the students are able to repeat individual skill assessments as needed until the semester ends. Each failed assessment becomes a learning opportunity as the students progress towards mastery.

The overall purpose of this paper is to 1) describe and evaluate three years of development and iteration of a mastery-based learning scheme for a machine kinematics and dynamics course, 2) explore the lessons learned from poor assumptions and other failures made during the first iterations of new course structure, 3) present a set of best practices for developing a mastery-based learning course, and 4) demonstrate that mastery-based learning can effectively address test anxiety and promote learning from failure.