Reflective Memo from Fall 2003

Summary

I completed the actions outlined in my reflective memo from last year. I continued to use various active learning techniques (prs + concept tests) and forms of regular feedback (e.g. mud cards, concept test results, etc.). One new addition was a quiz recap directly following the completion of the quiz. Based on student performance and subject evaluations, I believe that most of the students met most of the learning objectives. One exception is their understanding of the frame dependence of stagnation quantities which is inadequate. This is a long standing challenge.

Learning Objectives

1. What are the learning objectives (expressed as measurable outcomes) for this subject?

The subject learning objectives are contained on the course Web page. I do not have any changes to recommend to these.

2. To what extent were you able to integrate the CDIO skills specified for this subject in the Curriculum Plan of 2002?

I did not specifically implement any CDIO syllabus items since these are largely covered in the systems portion of Unified. However, several of the in-class experiments I did required 2.1.2 Modeling and 2.1.3 Estimation and Qualitative Analysis - see item 3. e) below. I would say both skills were taught at the "Introduce" level.

Teaching and Assessment Methods

3. What teaching and assessment methods did you use and what evidence indicates these methods were successful or not?

• Prepared lecture notes were available on the Web for all of the material. These notes have evolved over several years starting with a set of handwritten lecture notes. Each year I augment them when I find specific areas of difficulty from mud responses, etc. This year, I worked with Robin to increase the font size for the imbedded equations so they are more readable. I also added to the discussions regarding cp & cv and frame dependence of stagnation quantities. In general I am quite happy with the notes. In the end-of-term evaluations (PDF) 97% of the respondents rated the Web page (for all of Unified) Very Effective (70%) or Somewhat Effective (27%). 100% of the respondents rated the prepared lecture notes (for all of Unified) Very Effective (88%) or Somewhat Effective (12%).
• I used 25 concept questions over the 12 lectures with responses taken on the PRS system. The performance and answers to these were provided on the Web page. I continue to find these to be very useful for engaging the class in the material while I am lecturing. 100% of the respondents on the SEF rated the lectures Very Effective (64%) or Somewhat Effective (36%). 95% of the respondents on the SEF rated the in-class exercises as Very Effective (53%) or Somewhat Effective (43%). Also several positive comments were made about the PRS/concept questions in the written comments (PDF) from the end-of-term evaluations. In general my teaching reviews were good, so I think the students found my lectures to be helpful to them.
  
  
• I used mud cards for each lecture and responded to them the evening the lecture was delivered and put the responses up on Web. These responses were linked to the relevant areas of the online notes. See for example T1 mud responses. 82% of the respondents on the end-of-term evaluations said the mud cards were Very Effective (30%) or Somewhat Effective (53%), however the majority found they were only Somewhat Effective (53%). Nonetheless, I still found the mud cards to be valuable to me for providing feedback on each lecture. Even in cases where there were very few respondents it was helpful, therefore I will continue to use these.
• I wrote short assessments of each lecture (how they went). See for example T3 mud responses. This was mostly helpful for me, although I did use it to stress the important points from the lecture. I am not sure how many students read these responses. In general, I think that we have saturated the students in terms of available material on the Web. Further information goes un-read.
• I did 4 small demonstrations/in-class experiments. The students seemed to like these activities since they allowed them to apply the subject material to a real problem. They all were of the form where I asked the students to estimate something (using the concepts in class), then did the experiment and then discussed the result in light of their estimates. The activities thus had three primary objectives: to engage the students in the material we were working on and show them how to apply it, to highlight the various simplifications and assumptions in the engineering models we use, and to give the students practice in estimating various parameters required for input to the models (e.g. the volume of the room, or the weight of something, etc.)
• I had a formal self-assessment activity during the last recitation. I asked the students to grade themselves on the subject learning objectives. I did this largely as an effort to get them to think more deeply about the success criteria in advance of the exam, since based on past history their responses don't correlate well with their exam performance.
• I wheeled the CFM56 into class for one of the lectures. The students very much enjoyed this. I find that it prompts a degree of interest and a depth of questioning that I do not get otherwise.
• I used homeworks and exams to assess student learning. Each of the homework problems and exams was coded to specific subject learning outcomes. The overall weighting was 10% class participation, 30% homework, 60% quizzes. Also, the use of the PRS system in-class and for the self-assessment activity and the collection of, and response to, all of the mud cards gave me a large amount of data on the class performance. Also, as in the past in Unified, we collected data on time spent on various activities (its primary use is to make sure the class stays within bounds).