Abstract

Abstract –First-year engineering students at the University of Manitoba take a thermodynamics course. The summer instructor taught the course differently from the fall and winter terms. He combined tutorials with lectures to introduce active learning to the course, implemented an online problem library and increased the number of term tests.
 Students in the summer 2016 term were given a similar thermodynamic cycle question in their final exam as students in the winter 2016 term. Student performance inthe cycle question was compared in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the new teaching method.
 Both groups had similar question averages with generally similar question score histograms. However, winter students scored an average of 10% below their GPA, while summer students scored an average of 1% below their GPA. The difference between these averages is statistically significant (97.5% confidence). These results suggest that the new teaching approach leads to better student performance when solving thermodynamic cycles.

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