Develop a Better Way to Practice to Enhance Students' Experience in Learning Dynamics

摘要

In this paper we will share how we design appropriate practice activities in the undergraduate dynamics course to enhance students' learning experience and improve their problem solving skills. Solving dynamics problems involves numerous knowledge and skills such as problem formulation, applying concepts of dynamics, and finding numerical solutions etc. Students often find it difficult in learning dynamics because learning these concepts and solving problems have produced exceedingly high cognitive loads for their limited working memory. If learning activities were not designed to integrate characteristics of working memory, long-term memory, or the intricate relations between them, students won't be able to achieve truly learning via effectively using their working memory and gradually accumulating knowledge and skills in long-term memory. Therefore, we need to modify learning materials and design practice activities to match students' cognitive level. This teaching philosophy has been well explained in Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). On the other hand, researchers in psychology have done extensive work and theoretical development regarding elite performers' characteristics. It has been discovered that deliberate practice (DP) plays an important role in shaping expert performance because it leads to refinement and maintenance of the mediating mechanisms such as mental representation, anticipation skills, and control of motor actions etc. Based on CLT and principles of deliberate practice, we isolate elements of problem solving skills, develop repetitive and successive refined exercises to improve each of the elements, and schedule the sequence of activities to achieve smoother transitions to more complex learning tasks. We will share details of applying deliberate practice in teaching dynamics. Both attitudinal and objective assessment will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this teaching practice. The widely adopted Dynamic Concept Inventory (DCI) Version 1.0 will be used in our study as the objective assessment tool.