(134c) Student Confidence and Metacognition in a FE Review Course in Chemical Engineering

The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam is a nationwide, criterion-referenced, discipline-specific test that engineering students typically take late in their senior year, most often as a first step toward engineering licensure as a Professional Engineer.

The present study focuses on chemical engineering (ChE) seniors who completed a 3-credit review course, in part to prepare for taking the FE exam, but also to review major ChE topics (material/energy balances, mass/heat transfer, fluid mechanics, reaction engineering, materials science, process control) in preparation for a capstone design course the following semester. The first nine weeks of the course were focused on reviewing FE material mostly by solving FE-type problems with a varying range of difficulty. The course instructor used active learning methods during lectures and discussion sections such as Think-Pair-Share and Skeleton Notes. Students obligatorily took a half-length FE practice exam, referred to in this paper as the mock FE exam, near mid-semester. Those who did not pass the practice test, where “passing” was identified as correctly answering 50 percent or more questions on the exam, took a second practice test at the end of the semester.

To track students’ gains in ChE knowledge and problem solving, change in metacognitions and in attitudes, students submitted responses to weekly surveys for which they received a small homework credit. The questions focused on rating students’ confidence before and after solving each problem set, their degree of reflection when solving problems, and their problem-solving strategies. Student mastery of the technical content was established based on topic-level performance assessment through the Mock FE exam.

Our study was designed to address the following research questions, using quantitative analytic methods: 1. Does students’ confidence increase with the number of weeks of review—i.e., is there a cumulative effect for confidence? 2. Does students’ confidence to solve FE problems change after reviewing FE review topics? 3. Is confidence correlated with the mock FE test score? 4. Do students become increasingly reflective with each additional week of review—i.e., is there a cumulative effect for reflection? 5. Is reflection correlated with the mock FE test score?

Using a mixed-methods research design, we applied quantitative-qualitative data analysis methods to report changes in students’ perceived confidence, strategy use, and metacognition. Statistical correlations were computed between the survey responses and student performance on the FE practice exam. We consider the present findings in the context of existing literature in engineering education on students’ confidence, strategies, and metacognitive practices.

Quantitative survey responses showed significant gains in confidence after FE topic review activities and relatively consistent benefits in FE test performance associated with confidence ratings and metacognitive reflection ratings. The strong correlations between confidence and problem-solving performance are consistent with the didactic admonitions of Wankat and Oreovitz [1] and the instructional practices implemented by Woods and colleagues [2] [3] in engineering education. The present study also demonstrates that ongoing collection of students’ reactions across the semester has the potential of providing instructors with evidence-based motivation for keeping some teaching activities the same and for changing others, in order to make teaching most effective.

References

[1] Wankat, Phillip C., and F. S. Oreovicz. Teaching engineering. McGraw-Hill, 1993

[2] Woods, Donald R. "An evidence‐based strategy for problem solving." Journal of Engineering Education 89.4 (2000): 443-459.

[3] Woods, Donald R., A. N. Hrymak, R. R. Marshall, P. E. Wood, C. M. Crowe, T. W. Hoffman, J. D. Wright, P. A. Taylor, K. A. Woodhouse, and C. G. Bouchard. "Developing problem solving skills: The McMaster problem solving program." Journal of Engineering Education 86.2 (1997): 75-91.