2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

At our institution, Statics is taken by all undergraduate students who are pursuing an engineering degree. This course effectively unlocks the rest of the mechanical engineering curriculum, serving as a pre-requisite for subsequent core courses. Many of our students perceive Statics to be the first challenging engineering course they encounter, and it is not uncommon for students to voice difficulty adjusting to the rigorous coursework. Additionally, an increasing number of our students face barriers due to a lack of pre-requisite knowledge. Previous educational research has shown that alternative grading practices foster deeper student learning and understanding and promote positive changes in student attitudes towards learning from failure. Based on this evidence, our Statics course was updated to a Mastery-Based Learning (MBL) format. MBL is an alternative grading practice that emphasizes the importance of students gaining knowledge by the end of a course, not the speed by which they acquire it. The purpose of this restructure was twofold: (1) to ensure students who pass Statics have a strong foundation of concepts important for success in future mechanics courses (e.g., free body diagrams, equilibrium equations, basic vector analysis, etc.) and (2) encourage students to self-reflect on their mindset and attitude towards learning. To assess mindset and attitude of the course participants, the instructor used the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). The MSLQ is a validated, widely used assessment tool that provides a quantitative assessment of 5 factors pertaining to student mindset and learning strategies: self-efficacy, intrinsic value, test anxiety, cognitive strategy use, and self-regulation. The MSLQ was distributed to students enrolled in Statics at three timepoints during the course: beginning, middle, and end. Differences in mean student factor scores at each timepoint were assessed using a repeated measures ANOVA with a Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons. Results indicate significant differences at the 0.05 level for three of the five factors (self-efficacy, intrinsic value, and self-regulation), suggesting a shift in students’ beliefs about their ability to persist through difficulty and succeed, and in their perceptions of the course’s value.