The Repairing of Misconceptions through the Use of Inquiry-Based Activities

Misconceptions exist in all fields of learning and develop through a person’s preconception of how the world works. Students with misconceptions in chemical engineering are not capable of correctly transferring knowledge to a new situation and will likely arrive at an incorrect solution. The purpose of this thesis was to repair misconceptions in thermodynamics by using inquiry-based activities. Inquiry-based learning is a method of teaching that involves hands-on learning and self-discovery. Previous work has shown inquiry-based methods result in better conceptual understanding by students relative to traditional lectures. The thermodynamics activities were designed to guide students towards the correct conceptual understanding through observing a preconception fail to hold up through an experiment or simulation. The developed activities focus on the following topics in thermodynamics: “internal energy versus enthalpy”, “equilibrium versus steady state”, and “entropy”. For each topic, two activities were designed to clarify the concept and assure it was properly grasped. Each activity was coupled with an instructions packet containing experimental procedure as well as pre- and post-analysis questions, which were used to analyze the effect of the activities on the students’ responses. Concept inventories were used to monitor students’ conceptual understanding at the beginning and end of the semester. The results did not show a statistically significant increase in the overall concept inventory scores for students who performed the activities compared to traditional learning. There was a statistically significant increase in concept area scores for “internal energy versus enthalpy” and “equilibrium versus steady state”. Although there was not a significant increase in concept inventory scores for “entropy”, written analyses showed most students’ misconceptions were repaired. Students transferred knowledge effectively and retained most of the information in the concept areas of “internal energy versus enthalpy” and “equilibrium versus steady state”.

The Investigation of the Ways in Which Gender Stereotypes are Perpetuated through Questioning and Assessment Strategies in Inquiry-Based Science Classroom

The purpose of this study was to investigate the questioning strategies of preservice teachers whenteaching science as inquiry. The guiding questions for this research were: In what ways do the questioning strategies of preservice teachers differ for male and female elementary students when teaching science as inquiry and how is Bloom’s Taxonomy evident within the questioning strategies of preservice teachers? Examination of the data indicated that participants asked a total of 4,158 questions to their elementary aged students. Of these questions, 974 (23%) were asked to boys, and 991 (24%) were asked to girls. The remaining questions (53%) were asked to the class as a whole, therefore no gender could be assigned to these questions. In relation to Bloom’s Taxonomy, 74% of the questions were basic knowledge, 15% were secondary comprehension, 2% were application, 4% were analysis, 1% were synthesis, and 3% were evaluation.

How Porous are the Walls that Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’s Incarceration, and the Unsettled Self

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that purport to reveal our identities (e.g., race and gender), to emplace our bodies (e.g., within institutions, prison gates, and walls), and to specify our locations (e.g., cultural, geographic, socialeconomic). One crucial theoretical insight our work makes clear is that the model of social justice teaching to which we aspired necessitates re-conceptualizing ourselves as students and professors whose subjectivities are necessarily relational and emergent.

The Impact of Gender and Pedagogy on the Development of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies in Undergraduate Engineering Classrooms

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which pedagogy and gender of instructor impact the development of self-regulated learning strategies as assessed by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) in male and female undergraduate engineering students. Pedagogy was operationalized as two general formats: lecture plus active learning techniques or problem-base/project-based learning. One hundred seventy-six students from four universities participated in the study. Within-group analyses found significant differences with regard to pedagogy, instructors’ gender, and student gender on the learning strategies and motivation subscales as operationalized by the MSLQ. Male and females students reported significant post-test differences with regard to the gender of instructor and the style of pedagogy. The results of this study showed a pattern where more positive responses for students of both genders were found with the same-gendered instructor. The results also suggested that male students responded more positively to project and problem-based courses with changes evidenced in motivation strategies and resource management. Female students showed decreases in resource management in these two types of courses. Further, female students reported increases in the lecture with active learning courses.

Changes in Preservice Teachers’ Self-Efficacy: From Science Methods to Student Teaching

The purpose of this research was to assess preservice teachers self-efficacy at different stages of their educational career in an attempt to determine the extent to which self-efficacy beliefs may change over time. In addition, the critical incidents, which may contribute to changes in self-efficacy, were also investigated. The instrument used in the study was the Teaching Science as Inquiry (TSI) Instrument. The TSI Instrument was administered to 38 preservice elementary teachers to measure the self-efficacy beliefs of the teacher participants in regard to the teaching of science as inquiry. Based on the results and the associated data analysis, mean and median values demonstrate positive change for self-efficacy and outcome expectancy throughout the data collection period.

Effect of Participant Gender, Professor Gender, and Activity Interventions on the Understanding of Concepts in Thermodynamics

Misconceptions about heat and temperature have been seen across all educational levels, even in undergraduate engineering courses. One way these misconceptions can be remediated is through instructional methods, such as inquiry-based activities. Performance on assessments in sciences and engineering has been found to vary when gender is taken into consideration. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of participant gender, professor gender, and level of inquiry-based activities on the conceptual understanding of 247 undergraduate engineering students in thermodynamics. A pre-test post-test design was used. Conceptual understanding of thermodynamics was measured by students’ scores on the Concept Inventory for Engineering Thermodynamics (CIET; Vigeant, Prince & Nottis, 2011). Inquiry-based activities were developed by the researchers and given to professors who determined if they would do all, some, or none of them as they taught. Significant differences were found among participants of different gender, different gender of the professor instructing the course, and level of inquiry-based activity. The participants who were exposed to all of the activities provided didsignificantly better on the post-test than those who were only exposed to some or none of the activities. The results from this current study indicated that differences in gender, professorgender, and level of inquiry-based activity has an effect on undergraduate engineering students’ conceptual understanding of thermodynamics. Future research should investigate more factorsthat contribute to lower representation of women in the engineering field.

The Effect of Grade Point Average on Undergraduates' Understanding of Heat Transfer

Engineering students continue to develop and show misconceptions due to prior knowledge and experiences (Miller, Streveler, Olds, Chi, Nelson, & Geist, 2007). Misconceptions have been documented in students’ understanding of heat transfer(Krause, Decker, Niska, Alford, & Griffin, 2003) by concept inventories (e.g., Jacobi,Martin, Mitchell, & Newell, 2003; Nottis, Prince, Vigeant, Nelson, & Hartsock, 2009). Students’ conceptual understanding has also been shown to vary by grade point average (Nottis et al., 2009). Inquiry-based activities (Nottis, Prince, & Vigeant, 2010) haveshown some success over traditional instructional methods (Tasoglu & Bakac, 2010) in altering misconceptions. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether undergraduate engineering students’ understanding of heat transfer concepts significantly changed after instruction with eight inquiry-based activities (Prince & Felder, 2007) supplementing instruction and whether students’ self reported GPA and prior knowledge, as measured by completion of specific engineering courses, affected these changes. The Heat and Energy Concept Inventory (Prince, Vigeant, & Nottis, 2010) was used to assess conceptual understanding. It was found that conceptual understanding significantly increased from pre- to post-test. It was also found that GPA had an effect on conceptual understanding of heat transfer; significant differences were found in post-test scores onthe concept inventory between GPA groups. However, there were mixed results when courses previously taken were analyzed. Future research should strive to analyze how prior knowledge effects conceptual understanding and aim to reduce the limitations of the current study such as, sampling method and methods of measuring GPA and priorknowledge.