TEACHING MASTERY IN STATICS USING THE STEMSI ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

In this paper, we will convey lessons learned from a "flipped" mastery based Engineering Statics course.Statics is a foundation course upon which much of the Civil and Mechanical engineering curriculum is based.A poor understanding of even a portion of the topics covered in statics leads to poor performance in later courses.In a traditional classroom, a student might pass a course by achieving a C by understanding roughly 70% of the course material.However, this missing 30% might consist of critical material which is needed in later courses.Allowing students with a poor foundation to continue leads to propagation of student misunderstanding.In the mastery approach adopted in this paper, passing the course requires students to demonstrate mastery in each of 12 subtopics within statics.Sequential mastery in each topic was strictly enforced.For example, students with a poor understanding of vectors are unable to continue to a more advanced topic until they improve their ability to perform vector math.The STEMSI infinitely explorable online learning environment makes mastery learning practical in both small and large classrooms and has now been tested with classes containing over 150 students.Students learn at their own pace accessing online videos, practice problems, and assessment tests.Mastery learning has made a clear difference in student outcomes including significant improvements in vector mathematics, visualization, and promoted a better understanding of vector notation.Students have also demonstrated improved abilities to draw free body diagrams and analyze problems in mechanics.We will discuss practical aspects of the mastery classroom including the administration of exams, development of written skills, engineering solution presentation formats, and methods to achieve knowledge integration.Mastery learning has proven to be a significant improvement over the traditional classroom experience for students of all levels.We will also discuss our first attempts to expand this mastery concept to higher level engineering courses.