Examining and Influencing How Students Prepare for Engineering Classes

A common stigma that students often associate with an engineering degree is enduring an excessive workload. In fact, recent studies suggest that this perception is one of the primary reasons many students leave engineering majors and pursue other studies. This claim is also confirmed almost uniformly across all core engineering courses when students report on end of course surveys that they do not have enough time in their schedule to complete their assignments. As an educator, however, these claims are viewed from an admittedly critical perspective, especially after witnessing first-hand, frustratingly at times, poor study habits, weak time management skills and unacceptable daily preparation levels for class. In fact, this contradiction is highlighted further by a unique departmental policy requiring students to anonymously report how much time they spend preparing for each lesson. Each year, students report that they are actually spending on average just half the amount of time per lesson that is both expected and also used to design course requirements. So is it really fair, or even accurate, to label engineering with an “excessive workload” compared to other disciplines? As an educator, the potential to positively influence this apparent contradictory stigma and obvious source of frustration for both student and teacher forms the primary motivation of this study. This work examines how engineering students actually spend their time preparing for class and how we as teachers can positively influence it. The first objective investigates the true nature of student preparation. We explore if students actually complete or at least review assigned readings and what encourages them to do so. We evaluate how graded events drive student preparation and how much time is truly being spent preparing for class. The second objective evaluates certain teaching methods that reportedly enhance student preparation and learning. As a pilot study, our primary method requires students in a previously open-book-exam heat transfer course to rely on their own daily summary notes for all graded events. Students submit a summary outline from the reading within the front half of a sheet of paper for each lesson. Only sheets demonstrating completion of the assigned reading are approved and given back to students where additional notes can be written within the remaining space on the sheet of paper. Most importantly, this document serves as the student’s primary reference on examinations. Initial results show this method is administratively simple to implement and class preparation time, along with completion rates of assigned readings are noticeably higher compared to other core engineering courses. We feel this study will be of interest to educators in any technical field looking for a simple, “self-motivating” tool to enhance student preparation and learning.