Mode of Error Analysis of Student Responses to Pre-Requisite Knowledge Assessments

In engineering education there are a number of central concepts and skills that form threads which connect one content area to another within a discipline. These threads form the core of an engineering education and are the scaffold upon which all future knowledge is built. An incomplete understanding in any of one of these concepts at an early stage in a student’s education can lead to a cascade of failures or difficulties that resonate throughout their academic career. Although a program of study is designed so that students entering a given class have successfully completed all of the pre-requisite course material to attempt the class, student recall and understanding of prior content varies. A longitudinal study is in progress to assess student abilities and growth in these key threads. Current research has identified and mapped a number of central content and skill trajectories that are present in engineering education, focusing primarily on science and math content/skills essential to Mechanical Engineering. Several of these key content topics and skills have been assessed using pre-tests along their trajectories for selected classes. Common student errors (modes of failure) within these assessments have been identified and classified to generate a profile of the error modes for each topic. These modes of failure are indicative of cognitive issues such as transposition of skills, incomplete understanding of underlying concepts, and the disassociation of tool and concept. A severity of error scale has been developed and applied to student responses to facilitate the correlation of relationships between success and failure among the different trajectories. Results indicate that for many topics the types of errors encountered are shared by large numbers of students. Relationships between failures and the persistence of failures as students progress throughout the curriculum are presented. Validation of the error modes has been conducted through inter-rater reliability studies and student interviews.