Hands-on, Screens-on, and Brains-on Activities for Important Concepts in Heat Transfer

We have created analogous versions of our inquiry-based activities for misconception repair in heat transfer to ease faculty adoption into just about any type of instructional situation. Activities now work as laboratory experiments, in-class demonstrations, collaborative studio sessions, or simulations that can be assigned as homework. In our paper, we discuss each of these modes in detail and how they may be accessed through the AIChE Concept Warehouse. We also have measured the impact of each of these modes on the conceptual understanding of students; we know from previous work that studentconducted experiments are effective at repairing misconceptions. In our presentation, we will share the effectiveness of the alternate modes of presentation, as well as data on how easy these new modes are for faculty and students to use. We invite everyone who is teaching a heat transfer course or another course where ideas about radiation heat transfer, or factors influencing the rate and amount of heat transfer, to access these activities and freely use them in class. Background Engineering students encounter a number of challenging concepts throughout their studies. For some of these key concepts, many students hold preconceptions that inaccurately describe the physical world; for example, many people believe a tile floor is actually at a lower temperature than a carpet that is in the same room, because their experience tells them that a tile floor “feels colder” to bare feet (Prince et al., 2012b). Prior work indicates that a good way to overcome these misconceptions is through the use of inquiry-based activities (IBAs). For example, students who take a typical heat transfer course increase from a Heat and Energy Concept Inventory (HECI) score of 49.2% to one of 54.5% by the end of the course (Prince et al., 2012b), while those that use a collection of eight IBAs based on those concepts improve to a score of 66.3% (Prince et al., 2012a). IBAs involve small experiments that usually contain discrepant events – what really happens in an experiment is not what students with a misconception would predict. In the example just cited, students could measure the surface temperature of a number of materials and observe that they are identical. Our previous work found IBAs based on such experiments to be effective. However, many chemical engineering courses covering heat transfer concepts do not have an associated laboratory section, making IBA implementation challenging. In the absence of a lab section, it might be easier to run an IBA as a demonstration – however, we didn’t know if that implementation would maintain the effectiveness of the original student-run experiments. In this work, we sought to do three things. First, to re-write the activities into versions that would be easier for faculty to implement. Second, to test those versions to assess their educational effectiveness and ease of use. Finally, we are releasing all of these versions to the community for adoption through the AIChE Concept Warehouse.