Improving Retention of Student Understanding by Use of Hands-on Experiments in Statics

When a course in the Engineering Science of Statics is taught to a large number of students, how can the the multiple topics covered in the class be presented in a manner to increase the student’s understanding of the material? Statics is one of the foundation courses for an engineering student's education, and the topics learned in this course must be retained for use in follow-on courses in engineering. For a class with several hundred students in a semester, the problem becomes even more difficult as overhead projections are often the only way of presenting to a class of this size during theory sessions. Theory sessions of the course are not able to present material to small groups, a manner in which students might be more likely to retain what they have been presented. However, during the course discussion labs, where the number of students does not exceed 24 per instructor, students should be able to have more of a personal relationship with the instructor, and thus potentially better understand and retain material presented to them. Within the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology at Oklahoma State University, continued low test scores along with an unfavorable percentage of students retaking this course have led to a focus being placed on searching for ways of formatting the course in a manner to allow students to better retain the material presented. As a result, the professors involved in this course have been tasked with improving student’s ability to retain knowledge obtained, measured through test scores, as well as decreasing the percentage of students required to re-take the course due to non-passing grades. It is also generally agreed upon that if students better understand the beginning engineering courses, the retention of students within the college can be improved, which is always a topic of concern in higher education. One method that is being explored to improve student’s understanding in this course is the use of hands-on activities in the discussion labs that reinforce topics presented in the theory sessions. By utilizing these activities, students should be able to draw on the experiences to retain knowledge of individual topics. This paper will explore methods currently being utilized in a large format course in Statics, and in particular, how the use of hands-on experiments during discussion labs can lead to an increase in student’s understanding. Evaluation of the methods used will be based on homework and exam questions pertaining to specific topics in the course lab exercises.