Investigating Students' Performance for Textbook and in-House Homework Assignments

摘要

Homework assignments have always been an integral part of learning in all majors and disciplines. These assignments are usually selected from the textbook as these provide a variety of problems related to the topic at hand. Before the advent of internet, the solution manuals to these problems where confidential as they were in most cases hard copies mailed directly to the professor. Nowadays almost any problem in a textbook can have its solution available over the web, and many students are believed to have access. Since homework are sometimes used to assess the student learning outcomes, it is important to make sure the work presented by the students is descriptive of their understanding. The objective of this paper was to compare and analyze the grades on homework assigned directly from the textbook and those created and assigned for the first time by the instructor. In the latter case, the solutions were impossible to find by the students. The aim was to investigate the differences in performance between the different cases. To this end, a number of instructors in several courses in the Mechanical Engineering Department were alternating homework assignments between those never seen before and the ones from the assigned textbook. The average class grades on these assignments were considered as the performance indicator examined to determine if there is a particular trend. The result of this study shows that the average for the in-house homework was less than that of textbook and the standard deviation for the in-house homework was higher than that of the textbook assigned. It indicates that in-house homework can be used to assess the student learning outcomes. In addition, this study also shows that the difference was higher for Dynamics than the Statics and Strength of Materials. It suggests that for more challenging courses, the differences are more pronounced.