Introductory mechanics courses have important learning objectives focusing on students' ability to accurately draw or sketch particular types of diagrams, such as free body diagrams and graphs of shear forces and bending moments in beams. To achieve mastery of these drawing skills it is essentia] that students have many opportunities to practice and that they receive rapid and accurate feedback on whether they are drawing the correct diagram for a given mechanical problem. With the growing student enrollment in many engineering programs, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide prompt and accurate grading using the traditional approach of having students submit hand-drawn diagrams which are graded by a teaching assistant or grader. One way to circumvent this overwhelming grading process in large classes is to adopt multiple-choice questions. Unfortunately, assessing drawing skills using a multiple-choice instrument is mostly limited to testing students' interpretation of given drawings, rather than testing their ability to construct new drawings themselves. For example, research was conducted to investigate the validity of the use of multiple-choice questions to assess graphing abilities2. A group of students were asked to select the graph that best represented a situation, while a second group of students had to construct the graph that best represented the same situation. The results indicated that students obtained lower performance when responding to multiple-choice questions and concluded that the use of multiple-choice instruments to assess graphing abilities may be invalid.
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