2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper explores the effect of individual and small group cooperative Bloom’s Taxonomy-based in-class assignments on student performance and metacognition in two sections of a junior-level Fluid Mechanics course. In most undergraduate engineering courses, assessments require students to remember basic concepts and apply those concepts to solve simplified numerical textbook problems. These problems often do not prepare students to fully grasp fundamental course ideas, retain knowledge in the long term, and apply those concepts to solve real-world engineering problems beyond the textbook. In our previous research, we found that a minimal revision of homework, quizzes, and in-class activities to include questions at three additional Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of understand, analyze, and evaluate significantly enhanced students’ comprehension, performance on summative assessments, and overall learning experience. However, these positive results were evident only when implemented in an active learning classroom. In this study, we compare the impact of individual vs cooperative in-class assignments involving questions at the above-mentioned Bloom’s Taxonomy levels on student performance on individual formative and summative assessments. In particular, we aim to investigate whether small-group Bloom’s Taxonomy assignments encourage students to discuss various approaches of thinking about a problem and better understand the underlying concepts through back and forth of ideas, thereby improving their grades on future individual assessments, or if individual in-class activities are more effective at encouraging students to actively participate in their learning. Preliminary results suggest that a majority of students in one class section are able to accurately complete the in-class assignment in a group setting while a significant portion of students in another section are only able to answer the same questions partially correct when working individually. An end-of-semester survey will be conducted and analyzed to determine the impact of the two in-class active learning methods on student satisfaction and perceived learning.