The Effectiveness of Weekly Supervised Homework Sessions in an Aerospace Structural Mechanics Course

AAE 35200 is an aerospace structural mechanics course for third-year students majoring in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at Purdue University. In AAE 35200, students were given the opportunity to attend weekly optional one-hour supervised homework sessions instructed by a graduate teaching assistant (TA) during the Fall 2015 semester. The contents of the supervised homework session included the theoretical background and technical details about the assigned homework problems, knowledge beyond the original context of the problems, and alternative approaches to solve the problems. In this study, we investigated the effect of the supervised homework sessions on students’ homework and exam scores. We found that the supervised homework sessions had the most influence on the homework scores of the students with low native ability. Also, as the byproduct of the study, we investigated the effect of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)-Math scores on students’ academic performance. We found that the SAT-Math score was not correlated with the exam score. In order for us to rigorously study the effect of student attributes (independent variables) on the academic performance (dependent variables), we performed an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) on the experimental data, controlling for student attributes. We found that the attendance and interaction between SATMath and attendance were the two terms that influenced the homework scores the most.