team1

Carole Womeldorf, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Ohio University 276 Stocker Center Athens, OH 45701

Windows into their minds:
Exploration of preconceptions & misconceptions in fluid mechanics using conceptual questions.

Introduction:
Fluid mechanics is generally taught as a quantitative and mathematical engineering subject. As an instructor, I have anecdotally observed that many students fail to develop a confident and deep understanding of fluid mechanics based on one of two dominant pathways. The first pathway consists of marginal performance based primarily on weak math skills and a tentative grasp of the fundamental fluid mechanics concepts. Students in this group are often glad they have “just gotten through” the required fluid mechanics course, regardless of the grade received. The second pathway usually leads to stronger grade performance, but because of the heavy reliance on formulaic solving of the traditionally mathematically-based problems, many critical fundamental concepts are missed completely or, at best, remain distant abstractions rather than tacit knowledge.
In this proposal I propose a strategy that I believe will eventually reveal the fluid mechanics from the math – while simultaneously revealing the meaning behind the math of the fluid mechanics, with the desired outcome being the strengthening of the skills, confidence, and knowledge retention in both student groups.
Concept questions1, the building blocks of Concept Inventories2, are short questions carefully designed to precisely interrogate students’ preconceptions and misconceptions in a particular scientific or engineering subject area. Typically they are verbal and visual, minimally quantitative, multiple-choice questions.3 These questions, when properly designed around fluid mechanics concepts, provide believable wrong answers, known as “distractors,” that closely mimic students’ weakly or poorly formed ideas about the fluid mechanics around us. Further, analysis of the “distractors” can suggest pedagogical strategies to tackle head-on those misconceptions with more efficient and lasting approaches. (The term misconceptions is used broadly here, encompassing pre-conceptions or common-sense beliefs, as well as fully formulated misconceptions, or wrong thinking.)
This strategy of concept questions and illuminating distractors has been used successfully in physics education at both the high school and college levels1,2.. In engineering education, specifically in the area of fluid mechanics, the approach is still relatively new and the literature of student misconceptions is much more limited4.. This underdeveloped pedagogical strategy in both the literature and the engineering education culture means that new faculty members must rely heavily on textbooks which may or may not be appropriately sloped, or scaffolded, for the level of students they will be teaching.

Purpose of this Proposal:

The specific goal of this project is select or design concept questions appropriate for fully exploring conceptual understanding of a few critical and fundamental fluid mechanics concepts with Ohio University engineering undergraduates. Careful documentation of the conceptual domains will strive to ensure full coverage of the conceptual issues relating to each area. With student support and insight, existing and modified concept questions4 and new fundamental supporting concept questions in the area of fluid mechanics will be tested to ensure that each question best represents realistic choices students in engineering at Ohio University might pick. These questions together with the documentation will allow instructors to identify accurately underlying conceptual ideas of both the questions and the student errors.
Resultant identification of misconceptions will be published and presented at peer review venues to add to the literature of engineering education concept inventories and misconceptions. Interaction with instructors of undergraduate fluid mechanics will provide instructional expertise to the project as well as inform the process, with the goal of fostering the adoption of an appropriate fluid mechanics concept inventory (FM-CI) into their classroom setting.

Investigative Process:
Following the methodology laid out in Womeldorf (2007), a survey of concept questions will be gathered from three primary sources: existing concept inventories, fluid mechanics assessment literature (peer reviewed articles on misconceptions, text book problems, and appropriate fluid mechanics questions from the Fundamentals of Engineering exam), as well as the combined experience of both the principle investigator’s and colleagues’ experience teaching and studying fluid mechanics. The questions will be categorized according to concept area and subconcept areas. At this point an assessment of feasibility will necessitate a focusing of the scope to two or three major concepts. Tentatively, the proposed conceptual areas of focus will be: (1) pressure distribution in liquids and gases, (2) surface tension at interfaces between fluids, and (3) background fundamental definitions, visual representations, essential math, and discussion of units.
Based on the above sources, each major concept area will be subdivided into specific sub-concept areas. Concept questions will be grouped accordingly. At this point gaps in coverage by the concept questions will be identified and either questions will be constructed or further narrowing of scope will occur. Using a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, the questions will be tested using the Think-Aloud methodology5 both in open-ended and close-end demonstration tests. Responses and rationale, both written and verbal, will be recorded. Some of the areas of response analysis will include: Clarity – did students interpret the questions as expected? Did students feel that they fully understood the question? Completeness – were unanticipated assumptions necessary? Single concept testing – When students got the question wrong was it because they really believed something incorrectly or because there were other unanticipated pieces of knowledge required?
Once the concept questions are satisfying these basic criteria, students’ responses will be analyzed for specific organized paths of misconceptions as well as phrasing that will allow improvement of response wording to closely mimic both the rationale and the language of undergraduate students. Student testers will be expanded to include a small but diverse group of undergraduates, some who have already taken fluid mechanics and some who have not taken it, ideally with a variety of levels of academic performance. Appropriate IRB procedures will be followed.

Phase I -Summary of Activities:
Fall 2007-2008 & December

Initiate IRB process.
Purchase laptops & software for Think-Alouds.
Borrow camcorder to record Think-Alouds.
Review current listing of fluid mechanics CIs.
Review and amend as necessary fluid mechanics categorization of CIs.
Group into subsets for each subconcept.
Draft CIs to fill in gaps in subconcept groups.
Review draft CIs with graduate student.
Select “best” subset of CIs (up to 5 for each relevant subconcept), no more than 20.
Perform open-ended Think-Alouds with graduate student(s).
Evaluate responses for both question interpretation & answer alignment: with either (1) correct answer (for the correct reason) or (2) distractor (incorrect answer for projected reason) or (3) misalignment: (3a) correct answer (for the incorrect reason) and (3b) misfired distractor (incorrect answer for unanticipated/wrong reason).
Reevaluate and revise as necessary CI subset questions & answers.
Create four 1/4-subsets tests of 4-6 CIs each, distributed over each subconcept.
Perform open-ended Think-Alouds with undergraduate (fluid mechanics-free) student over four different days.
Winter Quarter 2007-2008
Evaluate responses for both question interpretation & answer alignment: with either (1) correct answer (for the correct reason) or (2) distractor (incorrect answer for projected reason) or (3) misalignment: (a) correct answer (for the incorrect reason) and (b) misfired distractor (incorrect answer for unanticapted/wrong reason).
Check for learning curve from Day 1 to Day 4 in each sub-conceptual area.
Check for overall test comfort level from Day1 toDay4.
Results will be submitted as an abstract to the ASEE National Conference for publication and presentation.
Spring 2007-2008
Peer review of questions – Drs. Khairul Alam, Guy Reifler, &/or Ben Stuart.
Reevaluate and revise as necessary CI subset questions & answers.
Perform closed-end Think-Alouds with four fluid mechanics-free undergraduates (three new & one repeat from #13); randomized question order between test takers to evaluate fatigue vs. time at test.
Summer 2008
Check responses from repeat student for consistency between open-ended & closed- end tests. (Overall: better or worse than random guesses?)
Check for learning curve from Q1 to Q20.
Check overall test comfort level from Q1 to Q20.
Reevaluate and revise as necessary CI subset questions & answers.
Draft pre-tests & final tests for CE 240 for Fall quarter, 2008-2009, using in-class Blackboard test administration.
Final results will be considered for submission for publication in an
engineering education journal.

Plan for Assessing Effectiveness: Because this project is focused toward the design of an instructional and assessment tool, traditional assessment approaches6 will not be achievable during this “creative’ period. That being said, several steps of the process outlined above contain student as well as peer assessment phases. If the final product is adopted voluntarily by one or more instructors of CE 340 that will be one determination of the process’s value. Feedback from the submission to a peer-reviewed conference and journal will hopefully provide valuable assessment information. And with a successful outcome to Phase I, it is hoped that Phase II may be funded. The plan for Phase II will be to implement the concept inventory in CE 340 in the Fall of 2008-2009 and, working with a statistician, evaluate for validity and reliability across a larger population using standard approaches that have previously been used to access concept inventories.6

Dissemination will consist, in the immediate domain, of working closely with the current instructors of CE 340 to explain the intent and process of the concept inventory and get feedback on their impressions. With three instructors, taught four quarters a year to both civil and mechanical engineering students, CE 340 Fluid Mechanics reaches over 100 undergraduates a year. External dissemination during Phase I will be a peer-reviewed conference paper and presentation at an ASEE conference and/or the FIE annaul conference. After Phase II, publication in a peer-review journal will be the goal: specifically the Journal of engineering Education, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, or the International Journal of Engineering Education, with an emphasis on the documented fluid mechanics misconceptions, reliability and validity statistical evaluation, and instructors’ reactions and participation. An eventual Phase III will be to work with participating instructors to design learning activities to actively target7 a range of learning styles and the documented persistent fluid mechanics misconceptions. Subsequent pre- and post-testing with the concept inventory will evaluate the effectiveness of the activities. Phase IV will be to begin again with additional fluid mechanics conceptual areas.

Budget Sources

SEOCEMS Faculty Mini-Grant $5,000
OSPR Research Challenge Grant $5,000

1. Mazur, E. 1997

2. Hestenes, D. 1992, 1995; and Halloun, I. 1985a, 1985b.

3. Womeldorf, C. 2007.

4. Martin, J. 2003, 2004.

5. Someren, M. 1994.

[Allen, K. 2004] Allen, K., Stone, A., Rhoads, T.R., Murphy, T.J. “The Statistics Concepts Inventory: Developing a Valid and Reliable Instrument,” Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition.

[Hake, R. 1998] Hake, R. “Interactive-Engagement Versus Traditional Methods: A six-thousand student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 66, 64-74.

[Halloun, I. 1985a] Halloun, I., and Hestenes, D. “The initial knowledge state of college physics students,” American Journal of Physics, 53(11), 1043–1055.

[Halloun, I. 1985b] Halloun, I., and Hestenes, D. “Common sense concepts about motion,” American Journal of Physics, 53(11), 1056–1065.

[Hestenes, D. 1992] Hestenes, D., Wells, M., and Swackhamer, G. “Force Concept Inventory,” The Physics Teacher, 30 (3), 141–151.

[Hestenes, D. 1995] Hestenes, D., Halloun, I. “Interpreting the Force Concept Inventory,” The Physics Teacher, 33 (8).

[Martin, J. 2003] Martin, J., Mitchell, J., Newell, T., “Development of a Concept Inventory for Fluid Mechanics,” Proceedings, 2003 Frontiers in Education Conference, Boulder, CO.

[Martin, J. 2004] Martin, J., Mitchell, J., Newell, T., “Work in Progress: Analysis of Reliability of the Fluid Mechanics Concept Inventory,” Proceedings, ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Savannah, GA, 2004.

[Mazur, E. 1997] Mazur, Eric, Peer Instruction: A User's Manual, Series in Educational Innovation, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River NJ.

[Someren, M. 1994] Someren, M.W. et al. The Think-Aloud Method: A Practical Guide to Modeling Cognitive Processes, Academic Press.

[Womeldorf, C. 2007] Womeldorf, C. “An Introduction to the Construction of Engineering Concept Inventories: Tools for impacting teaching, learning, and assessment” Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education, North Central Section Conference, Charleston, WV, March 2007.