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Unlike disciplines such as mechanics, where the concepts being taught can be easily seen in the movement of objects in everyday life, heat transfer lacks a visual element to guide conceptual understanding through observation. Traditional lecture style courses in the field of heat transfer are limited in how well they can convey certain difficult concepts. While they stress important ideas such as setting up control volumes and energy balances, they do not do a good job helping students distinguish between the three modes of heat transfer in real world problems (conduction, convection, and radiation), nor can they offer physical representations of problems to allow students to feel heat transfer taking place in different situations. This results in a lack of understanding of the underlying concepts of heat transfer, which is vital as it helps build a foundation from which to work and advance one’s thinking. As a way of overcoming this obstacle, challenge-based workshops were designed and given to a junior level heat transfer class at the authors’ institution. The hands-on workshops allowed the students to feel and observe heat transfer via the physical testing apparatus, heat flux sensors and temperature sensors that provided real-time data. These instruments, coupled with the open-ended, challenge-based pedagogy, provided opportunities for students to explore the differences between heat and temperature. This study examines the effectiveness of these hands-on, challenge-based workshops to improve junior-level heat transfer students’ conceptual understanding of heat and temperature. The conceptual knowledge of the students was assessed through a concept inventory test given at both the beginning and the end of the course. These results were compared to those of a control group of students who took the traditional lecture class without the workshops. The results from the concept inventory yield a significant difference between the total scores of the two groups (experimental and control) as well as certain individual questions. The questions showing significant improvement can be linked directly to workshops conveying the concepts stressed by those questions and include: the difference between heat flow and feeling a temperature difference, effect of surface properties on thermal radiation, and heat transfer in internal flow. Future work entails (i) identifying the concepts in heat transfer that are most important for students to grasp in order to understand the fundamentals of the discipline and (ii) investigating additional ways to evaluate students’ conceptual knowledge. The workshops will be restructured to best convey the concepts in a manner easily understood by someone with little or no experience in the field of heat transfer.

Assessing Effects of Challenge-Based Instruction on Conceptual Understanding In Heat Transfer