2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Studies of various educational strategies aimed at improving student performance focus heavily on self-efficacy, with surveys using validated scales developed to measure students’ confidence in their own skills and ability to perform tasks. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is identified by some of the sources as a key approach to increasing student engagement and teamwork, especially in laboratory courses and activities requiring creative thinking, such as engineering design. Some studies highlight benefits of hands-on experience and engagement with real-world problems. Overall, IBL has shown enhancement of multiple skills, such as teamwork, problem solving, communication, and technical understanding.
In this work we present the development of an inquiry-based laboratory exercise for a required junior-level heat transfer laboratory in the Mechanical Engineering curriculum at a large midwestern university. This is a course where Design of Experiment is well-scaffolded through guided practice of DoE in a pre-requisite fluid dynamics laboratory course, as well as three guided laboratory exercises in the Heat Transfer lab, followed by a novel four-week exercise where students design and conduct their own experiment. This pedagogy was created as a response to ABET Student Outcome 6: “An ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions.”
The laboratory course opens with a week of intensive instruction in Measurement Uncertainty Quantification (MUQ), which introduces many important aspects of designing an experiment. MUQ is taught using five online mini-lectures and quizzes and one in-lab group worksheet. The course then features three two-week long guided exercises in Thermal Measurement Techniques, Free and Forced Convection, and Heat Exchanger performance, which include pre-lab and post-lab worksheets designed to challenge the students to think about the DoE of the lab experiments. Following these exercises, the students work in teams to propose a heat transfer experiment of their own design, including a hypothesis to test, equipment to use, and data that they propose to collect. Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and the laboratory manager review the proposals and either approve them or require further development. Once their proposal is approved, students use the remaining weeks to complete their study and write a full technical report, which they submit using an assigned pseudonym. The project finishes with each student conducting a single-blind Peer Review of a student’s work from another lab section. Grading is based on the GTA’s assessment of the report and the Peer Evaluation.
Pre- and post-surveys of the students measure their self-efficacy, among other aspects of their experience with the course, to evaluate the effectiveness of this pedagogy. The pre-survey is conducted the week before the independent exercise begins and the post-survey is conducted after the Peer Review. The laboratory TA is also surveyed to gather their perspective on the student outcomes of the pedagogy.