Results from a Statics Concept Inventory and their Relationship to other Measures of Performance in Statics

Steif, Paul S.; Dollár, Anna; Dantzler, John

doi:10.1109/fie.2005.1611927

Cited by 22 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Results from this assessment have not been published, but preliminary results from the engineering-specific fields of statics [1] and thermodynamics [6], and the underlying theory imply that student conceptual understanding of engineering topics is expected to be as low as observed in other STEM areas.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Investigation of Students' Conceptual Understanding in Related Sophomore to Graduate‐Level Engineering and Mechanics Courses

Montfort

Brown

Pollock

2009

J of Engineering Edu

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Interviews were conducted with students from a sophomore‐level mechanics of materials class, a sophomore/junior‐level structures class, a senior‐level steel design class and a graduate‐level advanced steel design class to investigate students' conceptual understanding of bending and normal stress. The graduate students generally demonstrated higher computational skill and confidence but they were not significantly different from the sophomores in terms of conceptual understanding. Interestingly, the seniors showed markedly lower confidence in their ability to solve the problems posed in the interviews. Common difficulties include a conceptual definition of stress and reasoning involving the normal stresses developed under bending.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Investigation of Students' Conceptual Understanding in Related Sophomore to Graduate‐Level Engineering and Mechanics Courses

Montfort

Brown

Pollock

2009

J of Engineering Edu

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“…The Statics Concept Inventory is designed to "detect errors associated with incorrect concepts, not with other skills (e.g., mathematical) necessary for Statics" (Steif, 2004). Questions which contain numbers require only trivial calculations, and incorrect answers are based on incorrect assumptions rather than incorrect calculations.…”

Section: Statics Concept Inventorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Statistics Concept Inventory: Development and Analysis of a Cognitive Assessment Instrument in Statistics

Allen¹

2006

SSRN Journal

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“…Traditional views of cognition view concepts as a means for humans to categorize and organize the world 22 and serve as "big ideas" upon which knowledge may be founded 23 . Research within engineering education have explored issues of conceptual knowledge 24,21,25 , development of assessments such as concept inventories 26,27,28,29,30,31 , differences in understanding of concepts between novices and relative experts 32 , and identifying relevant concepts for various engineering domains 33,34 . Despite this wide range of inquiry regarding concepts in engineering academia, there exists a gap within literature addressing the role of concepts in transportation engineering practice and in the material contexts in which engineers are embedded.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concepts in Roundabout Resources: A Comparison Between Academic and Practical Text Using Content Analysis

Wallace¹,

Bornasal²,

Brown³

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

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Through the analysis of textual resources in reference to roundabout design, researchers explored possible differences in context presented in academic and practice-based resources through comparison of use and representation of engineering concepts. Researchers completed a content analysis of academic resources (i.e. textbooks) and field-collected, workplace resources (i.e. state and federal design guidelines and standards). Using engineering concepts (i.e. "sight distance," "superelevation," etc.) as units of analysis, researchers compared these two forms of material resources according to the prevalence of engineering concepts utilized, types of inscriptions utilized in concert with the concepts, structural differences in the layout of the resources, and differences in meaning associated with word usage in the two different forms of texts. Initial findings indicate suggestive (but inconclusive evidence) of a difference in use of visual representations in the texts. In regards to use and representation of engineering concepts, concepts descriptive of geometric elements of roundabouts were equally prevalent in both types of resources. Overall, there existed suggestive, but inconclusive evidence, in a difference in density of use of words relating to transportation engineering concepts between the two types of textual resources. The most interesting outcome of the analysis of data is the apparent different functions of auxiliary verbs between the sources in communicating information regarding design of roundabouts. This research explores textual resources from a situated learning lens allowing identification of concepts that are relevant to engineers as they design a specific transportation facility. It also initiates the identification of contexts relevant to the day-to-day work of practicing engineers. Students are viewed as "newcomers" as they transition from academia to industry and are poised to learn and be mentored by "old timers" through firsthand and secondhand experiences. As such, newcomers tend to learn via the perspective of their mentors, and-as cited by studies of newcomers to industry -they may not utilize their academic resources in the same way or even at all as they make their transitions to the workplace. By comparing the types of resources relevant to newcomers' experiences, and in particular, differences in the ways concepts are presented and the discourse emergent within the text, the gap between academia and practice may be better bridged.

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Results from a Statics Concept Inventory and their Relationship to other Measures of Performance in Statics

Cited by 22 publications

References 5 publications

An Investigation of Students' Conceptual Understanding in Related Sophomore to Graduate‐Level Engineering and Mechanics Courses

An Investigation of Students' Conceptual Understanding in Related Sophomore to Graduate‐Level Engineering and Mechanics Courses

The Statistics Concept Inventory: Development and Analysis of a Cognitive Assessment Instrument in Statistics

Concepts in Roundabout Resources: A Comparison Between Academic and Practical Text Using Content Analysis

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