A Study on the Student Success in a Blended-Model Engineering Classroom

One of the primary issues that many engineering educators face is the lack of engagement of students in their classroom. This becomes a more crucial concern for new engineering educators, many of whom lack any significant teaching experience. While the literature suggests a variety of factors that might negatively influence student engagement, the theory of “Tailored Instructions and Engineered Delivery Using Protocols” (TIED UP) specifically addresses the lack of engagement arising from a weak prerequisite base and the failure to connect to new concepts in the classroom. This is a blended teaching model where the content delivery follows a set of protocols inspired by the brain-based learning approach. In a typical TIED UP classroom, content delivery is performed using a scripted lecture, supported by short, animated and scripted concept videos that are generated before the class. The class time is carefully planned to include several small active learning pieces associated with each concept. Group work and peer mentoring is also encouraged for all the class activities. Formative feedback is collected from these activities and this feedback guides the activities in the following class. The videos are made available to the students for their further learning. This paper describes the implementation of the TIED UP approach in an engineering classroom in one of the largest public universities in the west coast. A study is conducted to compare the results of the summative assessments from a TIED UP classroom with those from a control semester. The paper highlights the preliminary results from this implementation and some insights for other educators who wish to adopt this technique in their engineering classrooms. Overall, the TIED UP approach is found to be very effective in communicating complicated engineering concepts. The student evaluations of the instructor are also improved in the TIED UP approach.