Difficult Concepts in Engineering Dynamics: Students' Perceptions and Educational Implications

摘要

Conceptual understanding plays an important role in science and engineering education. The present study focuses on an investigation of students' perceptions of difficult concepts in a high-enrolment, high-impact, foundational engineering dynamics course. A total of 88 undergraduate students who recently took an engineering dynamics course participated in the present study. At the end of the semester, students were asked to identify, from a list of 50 concepts in seven categories, those concepts that were difficult for them to understand or difficult to apply in problem solving. The results show that more than 20% of the surveyed students identified 11 most difficult concepts. The top three difficult concepts include the Principle of Angular Impulse and Momentum for a rigid body, the Conservation of Angular Momentum for a rigid body (or a system of rigid bodies), and the angular impulse of a rigid body. In general, the concepts that students perceived as most difficult were often associated with rotational motion, rigid bodies, impulse and momentum, and laws and principles in engineering dynamics. Students indicated that a concept would be more difficult for them to understand if it involved other concepts, especially rotational-related or angular-related concepts. The research findings of the present study imply that in education practices, such as classroom lectures and homework assignments, the instructor should pay more attention to concepts such as rotational motion, rigid bodies, impulse and momentum, and laws and principles in engineering dynamics.