2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This study evaluates the impact of evidence-based programming—specifically active learning through hands-on experiments—within a course on experimentation and data science, focused on aerospace engineering applications. The course emphasizes evidence-based learning by integrating real-world data and practical engineering challenges, aimed at fostering deeper understanding, engagement, and retention of complex concepts such as data collection, statistical analysis, and experimental design. To assess the learning outcomes, we plan to utilize the Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SAGL) survey as the primary evaluation tool. This course will run in the spring semester of 2025. We anticipate the results will indicate that combining PBL with hands-on experiments significantly enhances students’ evidence-based reasoning, problem-solving skills, and ability to apply theoretical knowledge in practical aerospace scenarios. The analysis of the SAGL data should reveal, for example, that these active learning strategies not only improve conceptual understanding but also promote collaborative learning and student confidence in tackling open-ended, data-driven engineering problems. We also hope to tie some of these outcomes and impacts to certain demographics such as women and BIPOCs. This paper will discuss the implications of these findings for improving engineering education through evidence-based active learning methodologies.