2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
From Familiarity to Proficiency: Using an Updated Student Assessment of Learning Gains Survey to Guide Course Design in Engineering Statics
Presented at Student Learning Experience, Behavior, and Engagement
Formative evaluation not only plays a fundamental role in engineering students’ growth as engineers, but is also imperative for instructors engaging in course refinement. Without input from students, instructors lack a complete understanding of the student perspective and are unable to bridge the gap between expected outcomes and instructional techniques. We developed a survey based on the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument as a course evaluation tool to assess students’ self-reported gains in learning outcomes and to identify instructional techniques that proved beneficial to their learning.
As part of an NSF-funded Research Initiation in Engineering Formation project, we reimagined a post-secondary engineering statics course through the lens of real-world, non-abstracted problems by implementing Problem-Based Learning. The initial iteration of this reimagined course was offered in Fall 2024 and focused on fostering engineering students’ ability to use abstraction to solve real-world problems through collaborative environments including group-based assessments. In the second iteration of the course in Fall 2025, we utilized students’ self-reported responses to an adapted version of the SALG survey to inform our changes to instructional methods while maintaining the lens of real-world, non-abstracted problems. The SALG survey features Likert-scale questions pertaining to learning gains for specific course topics (from “no gains” to “high gains”) and instructional methods (from “no help” to “high help”).
During our analysis of the Fall 2024 data, we realized that students enrolled in the statics course came in with a wide range of prior knowledge of STEM subjects related to course topics, and that a baseline of prior knowledge would help us establish what their self-reported gains meant in relation to their incoming familiarity with material related the course topics. For the Fall 2025 semester, we developed a baseline familiarity version of the SALG that we refer to as the Student Assessment of Learning Familiarity (SALF). The SALF, distributed at the beginning of the semester, is designed to determine a baseline of students’ prerequisite knowledge on course topics and preconceived notions of instructional practices that impact their learning by measuring students’ familiarity with these topics. The adapted survey uses the same statements as the SALG, but instead of reporting gains, students report familiarity with specific course topics (from “no familiarity” to “high familiarity”). The SALG, distributed at the end of the semester, references the same course topics, but asks students to self-report learning gains and beneficial instructional techniques for each topic. We use descriptive statistics to assess students’ self-reported learning gains in relation to their prior knowledge and to determine the instructional strategies they found most helpful for their learning in a statics course.
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Margaret Ann Bolick Clemson University [biography]
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Dr. Sarah Otterbeck Clemson University [biography]
The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026