Development And Assessment Of An Inquiry-Based Learning Activity In Dynamics: A Case Study In Identifying Sources And Repairing Student Misconceptions

A fundamental question in teaching engineering Dynamics is how to develop pedagogy to repair deeply ingrained student misconceptions about the physical world. This paper documents the development and assessment of an Inquiry-Based Learning Activity (IBLA) used to repair student misconceptions in an introductory Dynamics course. IBLA's consist of presenting teams of students with a physical situation and asking them to predict what will happen. The students next investigate the situation by experimenting with actual hardware that becomes the "authority", thus forcing students to confront their misconceptions. In this study, the authors developed an IBLA based on a question from the Dynamics Concept Inventory (DCI), a validated tool to assess conceptual knowledge in Dynamics. The IBLA was deployed in both an introductory and a second intermediate Dynamics course and assessed through pre-post DCI results, in class quizzes, homework problems, midterm questions and through written student reflections. Next, using videotape and peer prompting, the authors developed and collected a verbal protocol from individual Dynamics students as they worked through the activity using a "talk aloud" approach. Based on analysis of the videotaped transcripts a better understanding of the sources of misconceptions was identified and further refinements to the IBLA are being made. The paper contains the IBLA along with suggestions for implementation and improvements.