According to National Science Foundation data, African American students comprise 2% of the B.S. degree recipients in the geosciences, 2.6% in physics and 3.9% in engineering, while Blacks comprise 14.9% of the college-aged population. There is therefore an urgent need for Historical Black Colleges and Universities, which produce a large number of African American STEM graduates, to increase their focus on broadening STEM participation among underrepresented black students. Thus, there are untapped opportunities to develop intervention strategies and programs to increase recruitment, retention, and success of minorities in STEM and the workforce. The Experiment Centric Pedagogy (ECP) has been successful in promoting motivation and enhancing academic achievement of African American electrical engineering students. ECP uses a portable electronic instrumentation system, paired with appropriate software and sensors, to measure a wide range of properties, such as vibration and oxygen levels.
This work in progress describes the initial adaptation of an evidence-based, experiment-focused teaching approach in biology, chemistry, civil engineering, industrial engineering, transportation systems, and physics. ECP will be utilized in these disciplines in various settings, such as in traditional classrooms, teaching laboratories, and at home use by students. Instructors use ECP for in-class demonstrations, for cooperative group experiments, and for homework assignments. The paper will highlight the criteria used for selection of initial experiments to adapt, the modifications made, and resulting changes in the course delivery. Preliminary results will be provided using measures of key constructs associated with student success, such as motivation, epistemic and perceptual curiosity, engineering identity, and self-efficacy. This project is conducted at a minority serving institution and most participants are from groups historically underrepresented in STEM.
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This content will become publicly available on June 25, 2024
Utilization of Inexpensive, Safe, and Portable Electronic Instrumentation System to Increase Students’ Performance in Multiple Stem Disciplines
The experiment-centric pedagogy (ECP) teaching approach is a less cumbersome way of
introducing core and fundamental topics in STEM through relevant practical and hands-on
sessions that are carefully incorporated into lectures. The philosophy of ECP is that students learn
better by doing. Hence, it promotes the practical implementation of fundamental theories in STEM
fields by using inexpensive basic elements to develop portable but extremely effective units for
use by these students. The portability of these units enables these students to conduct these
experiments in the comfort of their homes, while their low cost makes it highly affordable. With
carefully curated experiments across different departments such as Electrical, Civil, Physics, and
Computer Science, ECP has been able to develop informative experiments to calculate impedance
and transient current in RLC circuits buttressing the concept of ohm’s law in electrical engineering
and physics, combinational and sequential circuits such as adders, multiplexer, subtractors,
decoders, counters, and shift-registers in computer Science. ECP also implemented data
acquisition systems alongside experiments to demonstrate Hooke’s law with respect to stress/strain
on a flat metal bar and measurement of the pressure of a thin-walled cylindrical vessel in civil
engineering. These experiments help students develop a good understanding of these concepts,
which are the building blocks of their respective fields. Early results of ECP have shown that there
has been a significant improvement in students' interest in these STEM courses.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915614
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10467756
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE https://sftp.asee.org/42979
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- https://sftp.asee.org/42979
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["Experiment-centric pedagogy, Portable Electronic Instrumentation, Multiple STEM Disciplines"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://sftp.asee.org/42979
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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