Perspectives from the Classroom - Developing Effective Concept Questions and Collaborative Learning for an Introductory Materials Engineering Course

Several relatively recent research studies have shown that students understand more about what they are studying if the course environment includes active/conceptual learning opportunities. While effective concept questions have been developed for many introductory courses, this is not the case for introductory materials engineering. This paper describes our research work to develop effective concept questions for materials engineering. To this end, what percentage of students had the right conceptual understanding after the lecture during their first attempt to answer the concept question was tracked, as was the percentage of students who had the correct conceptual answer on their second attempt. From Mazur's work, we know that for concept questions to be effective, they can neither be too hard, nor should they be too easy. Equally important in developing concept questions, is trying to understand why the students get the question wrong and then finding strategies to help students overcome their misconceptions. The paper also describes how technology was used to facilitate such changes and what the opportunities and barriers are