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- Title
An Investigation of Students' Conceptual Understanding in Related Sophomore to Graduate-Level Engineering and Mechanics Courses.
- Authors
MONTFORT, DEVLIN; BROWN, SHANE; POLLOCK, DAVID
- Abstract
Interviews were conducted with students from a sophomore-level mechanics of materials class, a sophomore/junior-level structures class, a senior-level steel design class and a graduate-level advanced steel design class to investigate students' conceptual understanding of bending and normal stress. The graduate students generally demonstrated higher computational skill and confidence but they were not significantly different from the sophomores in terms of conceptual understanding. Interestingly, the seniors showed markedly lower confidence in their ability to solve the problems posed in the interviews. Common difficulties include a conceptual definition of stress and reasoning involving the normal stresses developed under bending.
- Subjects
ENGINEERING education; MECHANICAL behavior of materials; STRUCTURAL engineering; STEEL in design; BENDING (Metalwork); STRAINS &; stresses (Mechanics)
- Publication
Journal of Engineering Education, 2009, Vol 98, Issue 2, p111
- ISSN
1069-4730
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/j.2168-9830.2009.tb01011.x