Reinforcing Critical Thinking Skills Using a Homework Layout in Engineering Physics Course

Practice is the key to success. Homework problems play a crucial part of that practice. Unfortunately, in our classrooms, the trend is to use a web-based system to assign and grade homework problems. Web-based systems present many advantages. For instances, they save instructor’s time on grading, randomized values on problems may discourage cheating, students can use links to the related electronic text before solving a problem, etc. However, web-based systems are focused on the answer only. Students become careless of their work and even try trial and error method just to get the correct answer. In this study, the author presents the assessment of hand-written homework layout used in engineering physics course. A web-based system was also used along with the hand-written homework layout. The purpose was to reinforce students’ critical thinking skills by focusing on the process of how to obtain an answer instead of the answer itself. Critical thinking skill takes time to develop, but with the layout most students showed their thinking process when solving problems. More and more, the students accepted the layout as their approach to any problems, became more organized, made less mistakes or easily found their mistake, and got used to the layout with time. Background Nowadays, online homework sites have replaced the old-school hand-written homework assignments. There are pros and cons of online homework assignments and several studies focused on comparing the effect of online vs. hand-written homework assignments on students’ understanding of physics concepts. The conclusion drawn was that there is no significant difference between these two types1-3, the key factor was that increased student understanding occurred when homework was graded3. 
 In 1949, Burke defined critical thinking in a way that a person’s behavior would describe if they exhibit the skill4. A few exemplary behaviors that constitute critical thinking skill are differentiation between reliable and less reliable sources, criticizing faulty deductive reasoning, drawing valid inferences from given information, recognizing assumptions to be made, estimating probability of an interference and criticizing given estimates, and recognizing the existence of errors of measurement4. In 1987, Murugesan5 defined not being able to think critically as “students have the greatest difficulty in distinguishing and connecting various concepts and formulae”. Although Murugesan claimed that it was up to the students to overcome not being able to think critically, Edmiston6 blames the teachers. Not only the teachers at school but the first teachers a child has in their life parents. He stated that “Children are usually not taught to think critically by their parents, by their kindergarten teacher, by any teachers. Most likely, the majority of their teachers are not critical thinkers.” After several decades, we still face the same issue in our classrooms how to teach our students to be critical thinkers. This study focuses on reinforcing critical thinking skills using hand-written homework assignments. Design/Method Engineering physics courses, Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism (E&M), are among the fundamental courses that students build their engineering career on. During these courses it is important to reinforce students’ critical thinking skills. Most students tend to accept the information given as it is, without questioning it. Although students are exposed to more activities and assignments in the upper level classes where they are required to show their critical and analytical skills, the stronger the foundation the more prepared they are for the future challenges. For this reason, in the E&M course students were asked to submit their handwritten homework in a structured layout where they had to: First, state what is given and what has been asked of them to find with a detailed figure; second, provide assumptions, a plan and an estimate and, finally, submit step-by-step solution of the problem with a brief discussion at the end. With this layout students identify the problem, create a methodology to solve the problem, apply the methodology to the problem and evaluate the result by considering its limitations, how reasonable it is, and the dimensions and units of the answer. The engineering physics courses are 5-credit and the E&M course has lecture and lab hours separated. There were two sections of this course in the Fall 2016 with about 35 students in each section. Since the number of students are high relative to other classes (18-20 students), two instructors were present during lectures. While one instructor had the leading role throughout the semester, the other instructor’s main role was to help students during question or problem sessions. The concepts were introduced briefly using powerpoint slides. 5-10 conceptual questions were asked in each lecture and students used electronic clicker remotes to answer quickly. Simulations, demonstrations and video clips were also used frequently. After introducing a concept, usually a simple example problem was solved with the class to illustrate the application of the concepts and equations. In addition, after each chapter 4-5 extra problems were provided to students as handouts. Students were given time to solve a few of them in class with the guidance of the instructors. Labs were separated into 4 sections with approximately 18 students in each section. One instructor was present in each lab section. There were a total of ten homework assignments and six exams. Homework assignments were assigned on WileyPLUS (WP) which is an additional online source for the Fundamentals of Physics, Halliday textbook used for engineering physics classes. The assignments were separated into two parts. The first part consisted of multiple-choice questions to measure conceptual understanding and the second part consisted of open-ended problems to practice problem solving. Separating multiple-choice questions from open-ended problems helped manage grading more effectively on WP. While the attempts on multiple-choice questions were limited to 3 with a penalty after each attempt, open-ended problems had unlimited attempts with no penalty. Students were asked to submit hand-written solutions to open-ended problems only. Each assignment had about 10 open-ended problems and students were asked to solve each problem using the hand-written homework layout. The majority grading was done by the WP. Multiplechoice questions were out of 12-15 points whereas problems were out of 100 points. The latter was counted as the correctness score in the hand-written homework. The grading of the handwritten homework was done by the lead-instructor only. For that reason, only 4 assignments were graded. Students obtained maximum of 42 points as the format score from the rubric for the layout to be added to the correctness score (only when the assignment was graded for the format). They were not told which assignments were going to be graded so they assumed each assignment was likely to be graded. Students were expected to improve on using the structured layout by getting feedback from the instructor on homework and exams. Assessment of this method was done in three different ways: 1. Handwritten homework 2. Exams 3. Feedback from students Feedback from students was collected three times: 3.1. Anonymous feedback collection on Moodle in the first weeks of the semester. 3.2. Small group instructional diagnosis (SGID) in the middle of the semester. 
 3.3. Final anonymous feedback collection on Moodle in the last weeks of the semester. In 2016 academic year, students submitted their homework assignments two ways online and hand-written in Engineering Physics: Mechanics (Spring) and E&M (Fall) courses. Initially, in the Mechanics course, they were not required to follow a structure in their handwritten homework assignment other than showing work by starting from the original equations and showing several steps before reaching the answer. There are several advantages of collecting both online and hand-written submission. Mainly, students can benefit from all the pros1 an online system provides. They get immediate but brief feedback whether their answer is correct from the online submission. Whereas creating handwritten solutions in structure that promotes thinking about the problem helps them to be better critical thinkers. Einstein said “It is not that I’m so smart, it is just that I stay with problems longer”. The main goal of the hand-written layout is to have students think about a problem a little longer than usual. Most students only focus on what the answer is rather than the ways to get to the answer and whether the answer makes sense. The first calculus based physics course, mechanics, uses an active learning textbook7,8. The layout used in homework assignments was emphasized in this textbook with in-class or supplemental example problems in the Spring semester. Except a few transfer students, all others were familiar with the layout. However, the students in the mechanics class were not asked to apply the layout in hand-written homework. As a result, most of their homework submissions lacked organization, neat solutions, good spacing, and, more importantly, the evidence of their thought process. In the Fall semester, students were provided format rules and directions to complete their hand-written homework assignment along with online submission. The layout and instructions used in E&M course is as follows: Given, Find, Figure, Assumptions, Plan, Estimate, Solution, and Discussion. The full homework format rules are provided in Appendix A. Students were also required to attach homework coversheet shown in Appendix B where they go through a checklist for the format and provide their online homework score (correctness score) for each problem. Their total homework grade was based both on the correctness score obtained from the online system and the