Exploring Conceptual Understanding in Heat Transfer: A Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

Tom Diller was a Hertz Fellow at MIT, which culminated in a Doctor of Science degree in 1977. After working at Polaroid Corporation for several years, he has been teaching mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech for over 35 years. His current research focuses on the development and use of new instrumentation for measuring heat transfer. Applications include high-temperature unsteady flows, such as found in gas turbine engines and for non-invasively measuring blood perfusion in the human body. He continues to work to transition research results to industrial and laboratory applications and has published well over one hundred papers in areas encompassing heat transfer, fluid flow, biomedical engineering and instrumentation. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate heat transfer courses with approximately 300 students per year. This encompasses computer usage in class and active learning innovations. Dr. Holly M. Matusovich, Virginia TechDr. Matusovich is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Department Head for Graduate Programs in Virginia Tech's Department of Engineering Education. She has her doctorate in Engineering Education and her strengths include qualitative and mixed methods research study design and implementation. She is/was PI/Co-PI on 8 funded research projects including a CAREER grant. She has won several Virginia Tech awards including a Dean's Award for Outstanding New Faculty. Her research expertise includes using motivation and related frameworks to study student engagement in learning, recruitment and retention in engineering programs and careers, faculty teaching practices and intersections of motivation and learning strategies. Matusovich has authored a book chapter, 10 journal manuscripts and more than 50 conference papers.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Exploring Conceptual Understanding in Heat Transfer:A Qualitative Analysis AbstractResearch shows that engineering students struggle to understand concepts in certain core engineering courses such as heat transfer. Students may be able to solve specific problems by following a sequence of steps (referred to a procedural knowledge), but often lack conceptual knowledge, or deep understanding of concepts and the relationships among concepts. Yet it is this conceptual knowledge that can help students transition from novice to expert in a domain. Ideally, procedural and conceptual knowledge are developed in an iterative process where increases in one type of knowledge lead to increases in the other. To determine the extent to which students balance the development of conceptual and procedural knowledge, prior studies examined the way in which students described their approaches to learning in statics courses. The current research expands on this prior work by examining the relationship between students' approaches to learning and their conceptual understanding of heat transfer material. We compared students in two sections of a heat transfer course: the experimental section had a hands-on workshop in addition to lectures, and ...