ENHANCING STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF DYNAMICS CONCEPTS THROUGH A NEW CONCEPT MAPPING APPROACH - TREE OF DYNAMICS

摘要

Dynamics is a sophomore-level course that many engineering students are required to take. The course is widely regarded as one of the most difficult undergraduate courses to succeed in because the course covers numerous foundational concepts. Inspired by and built upon the conventional concept mapping approach, this paper proposes a new concept mapping approach, called the "Tree of Dynamics," to enhancing students' understanding of dynamics concepts. In the new approach, the relationships among dynamics concepts are represented by tree structures (such as roots, trunks, branches, leaves, and fruits) rather than by linking words and phrases. The new approach enhances students' perception (cognitive intuition) of the relationships among concepts and also adds an element of fun to student learning. This paper describes in detail how to build a tree of dynamics and provides three representative examples of student-constructed versions. The assessments from the pre-post test results have shown that the average learning gain for all student participants was 64.2%. Compared to the average pretest score, the average post-test score increased 1.45 standard deviations. Seventy-one percent of the students surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that the "Tree of Dynamics" helped them understand hierarchical relationships among dynamics concepts and associated equations.