Assessment and Analysis of Learning via a New Approach! Teaching Electrical Circuits Course by Mastering Engineering

Abstract

Teaching electrical engineering circuits to undergraduate non-electrical engineering majors such as Mechanical Engineering students is a challenging and motivating adventure. The basic circuit concepts are long-standing; Ohm’s laws are centuries old but still students struggle to solve problems involving the application of Ohm’s laws when incorporating it with other ideas. For example, in the node voltage analysis, estimating the currents entering and leaving a node using Ohm’s law is sometime problematic to students. Exploring new techniques for teaching electrical circuits is a continual journey. For our part, we have introduced Mastering Engineering online problem solving and answering approach for electrical circuits with the intent to improve students’ learning skills and mastering circuit concepts. This online assignments have video based coaching problems, tutorials with hints to guide students to learn the electrical circuit concepts and regular text book end of chapter homework problems. As part of the course requirement, students are assigned to do the conceptual problems to self-learn and to do more advanced problems to master the concepts. This mandatory requisite makes them learn the chapter-materials in more in-depth. The aim of this study was to determine whether this tool will indeed help students to learn the course materials to their own as well as to their instructors’ satisfaction. This report will present information about the Mastering Engineering approach used in our sections and the weekly workload assigned to students. The study will present the average time spent by students for each assignment, individual problems, and the total time spent by students to do the assignments. In addition to this work, at the end of the semester, a survey was done to see how much mastering Engineering helped our students to master the course materials. About hundred students, from two different sections participated in the survey. The data was analyzed using a spreadsheet and the outcome will be reported in this paper. This particular study was done for electrical circuit course taught to non-electrical engineering students. The electrical circuit course for non-electrical engineering students is a challenging task. The course covers mainly circuit analysis using various laws and theorems, and applications of electrical engineering, such as AC circuits and electric power, magnetic circuits, transformers, and rotating machines.