2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background

Pedagogical research regularly provides evidence supporting various improved methods of teaching students. Some common examples include the flipped-classroom model, reducing workload to focus on the essential skills and knowledge students need to learn and retain, and various forms of active learning. For instructors, though, it can be overwhelming to wade through all the studies and determine the best approach for any given course.

Over the past decade, the introductory course in aerospace engineering at a large midwestern research university has been taught by various faculty, in a variety of modalities and using various methods, and including different content. The numerous changes in the course were driven by feedback from accreditors and students, as well as pedagogical literature and faculty availability. This inadvertently provides an opportunity to compare student performance in the course over the years and determine the relative impact of the various changes.

Course Information

Introduction to Aerospace Engineering is a second year course offered in autumn semester, and it is the first course in the major. It had an enrollment of 125-150 students for most of the period under consideration, with growth this year to 185. While the students are mostly aerospace engineering majors, the course is also taken as a technical elective by a few students in other majors (primarily Aviation and Engineering Physics). The course is laboratory-intensive, with 10 labs spread across the 16 weeks. All students are in one lecture section (except for 2022 due to COVID restrictions forcing two lecture sections) but are split into lab sections of roughly 25 students.

The course has undergone changes in almost every aspect, rarely staying the same for two years in a row. The major changes are summarized in Table 1. The course has had three regular instructors over this period, with the most recent years taught jointly – Instructor 2 focused on the laboratory while Instructor 3 ran the lectures. The course began this period as a standard lecture course with three 55-minute lectures per week plus a weekly lab/recitation session taught by one instructor, with all content related to aeronautics. A second introductory course in spring semester contained all astronautic-related material taught in the second year.

The paper will detail the changes made and the motivation behind each change and will use student grades in the introductory course and on the final examination as well as anecdotal feedback from the instructor of the follow-on courses (Thermodynamics, Aerodynamics) to gauge the impact of the changes on student performance. The main takeaway will be the relative importance of different types of changes, which may inform others considering changes to similar courses.

Table 1. Summary of structural changes to Introduction to Aerospace Engineering course (can't paste a table, so formatting modified below)

Year / Instructor(s) / Modality / Lectures / Lab/Recitation / Content
2014 / 1 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / F - 120 minutes / Aeronautics only
2015 / 1 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / F - 120 minutes / Aeronautics only
2016 / 1 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / F - 120 minutes / Aeronautics only
2017 / 4 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / F - 120 minutes / Aeronautics only
2018 / 1&2 / In-person, flipped / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics only
2019 / 1 / In-person, flipped / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics only
2020 / 2 / Synchronous online, flipped / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics only
2021 / 2 / In-person, flipped / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics only
2022 / 2 / In-person, flipped / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics & Astronautics
2023 / 2&3 / In-person lecture / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics & Astronautics
2024 / 2&3 / In-person lecture / T,Th - 55 minutes / M,W,F - 55 minutes / Aeronautics & Astronautics
2025 / 2&3 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / T,Th - 55 minutes / Aeronautics & Astronautics
2026 / 2&4 / In-person lecture / M,W,F - 55 minutes / T or Th - 80 minutes / Aeronautics & Astronautics