Learning Experiences of Using Teaching and Assessment Tools for Solid Mechanics Course

This paper describes the author's experiences of using a few teaching and assessment tools for Solid Mechanics course taught at Kettering University. This course is taught at junior level and is offered during all the four terms. Kettering University is a co-op institution in which the students alternate each term between work and school. This creates a time gap between the study and the work terms, posing some challenging issues for many students to retain the pre-requisites knowledge. It is very time consuming to review the pre-requisites knowledge to get the students back on track in either the Solid Mechanics or in the Machine Design courses. This paper describes the teaching and learning experiences of incorporating some of the teaching and assessment tools to improve the overall performance in the Solid Mechanics course. Some of these simple tools include reaching out the students during their work term by sending them the upcoming course review materials, implementing cooperative learning and project based learning through in-class group work and group homework, assignment of mini-projects, etc. It was observed that using some of these tools improved their overall understanding and better performance as measured by their scores on the final examination. The final examination questions have been carefully designed by a group of faculty teaching this course so that each question is tied with the course (or student) learning objectives (CLOs or SLOs) and the program outcomes (POs). Sample assessment charts are presented at the end of the paper and discussed.