Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Exploring Civil Engineering Undergraduate and Practitioners’ Performance on Strength of Materials Concept Inventory

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/vx021n666

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  • Preparing successful engineering undergraduate students for the workforce is imperative and requires students to apply their conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals to engineering design work. Conceptual understanding is assessed through the use of concept inventories. Learning theories may help explain differences in concept inventory performance. Expert novice theory suggests that experts understand the concepts as big ideas and would be able to solve problems where they have conceptual understanding. Situated cognition theory suggests that knowledge is contextual, and performance would hinge on the participant's familiarity with the question and the visual representations in the question. Although there is a growing body of literature analyzing students' conceptual understanding through concept inventories, few studies focus on how or if conceptual understanding transitions into engineering practice. The purpose of this study is to explore differences in conceptual understanding of strength of material concepts across engineering undergraduate students and professional civil engineers. Researchers implemented the Strengths of Material Concept Inventory, collecting data from 153 engineering undergraduate students and 119 practicing civil engineers. The statistical analysis revealed that overall structural engineers performed better than non-structural engineers and engineering undergraduate students. In addition, findings from this exploration noted that performance from all participants is low in shear stress beam questions. Results suggest that differences in performance between the groups may be due to the way concepts are situated and interpreted across academic and workplace contexts. These findings point to the need to further develop the concept inventory through a qualitative interview approach investigating conceptual understanding in practice and validating the instrument. Focused, in-depth explorations can provide researchers with additional explanations and reasonings on practicing engineers conceptual understanding while solving problems. Obtaining this information can offer tools for aligning educational practices and prepare students for the engineering workforce.
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