Paper ID #30515 Implementation and Evaluation of Active Learning Techniques: Adaptable Activities for A Variety of Engineering Courses Dr. Jillian Schmidt, Missouri University of Science and Technology Dr. Jillian Schmidt is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She teaches primarily first and second- year engineering design courses, and her research interests include technology incorporation and team dynamics in project based courses. Dr. Nicolas Ali Libre, Missouri University of Science and Technology Nicolas Ali Libre, PhD, is an assistant teaching professor of Civil Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He received his BS (2001), MS (2003) and PhD (2009) in civil engineer- ing with emphasis in structural engineering, from University of Tehran, Iran. His research interests and experiences are in the field of computational mechanics, cement-based composite materials as well as in- novative teaching techniques. Dr. Libre is the manager of Materials Testing lab at Missouri S&T, teaches mechanics of materials and develops digital educational resources for the engineering students. He had the opportunity of leading several scientific and industrial research projects and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students. Over the span of his career, Dr. Libre authored and co-authored 3 chapter books, 17 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 60 conference papers. He has advised and co-advised 8 gradu- ate students and mentored over 30 undergraduate students. He has collaborated with scholars from several countries, including Iran, China, Slovenia, Canada, and the US. He also served as a reviewer for 6 journals and a committee member of 5 conferences. He is the recipient of the University of Missouri President Award for Innovative Teaching (2018), the Teaching with Technology Award in the Focus on Teaching and technology conference (2018), Joseph H Senne Jr. Academy of Civil Engineering Faculty Teaching and Service Achievement Award (2017) and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Society of Leadership and Success (2016). c American Society for Engineering Education, 2020 Implementation and Evaluation of Active Learning Techniques: Adaptable Activities for A Variety of Engineering Courses Abstract Active learning is a form of learning approach in which students are actively involved in the learning process through specially designed activities, often in groups, followed by reflection upon what they have done. The effectiveness of active learning techniques that are intended to improve students’ learning outcomes is highly dependent on the extent to which students are participating in the activity and also on the feedback they receive throughout or at the end of activity. While many studies have shown the positive impact of such approaches on students’ performance, many instructors still hesitate to implement active learning in the classroom. Typical concerns and obstacles include the difficulty of designing an effective activity, the required time for conducting the activity, the tools needed for facilitating the activity, and the willingness of students to engage in the activity. This paper is aimed at providing a library of active learning strategies that could be used in teaching various engineering courses, discussing strategies to ensure students are effectively engaged in the activity, and evaluating the impact of those approaches on students’ performance. The implemented techniques include pop-up quizzes followed with a group discussion and small group challenge problems with timed release of hints throughout the activity; also algorithmically coded questions with randomly generated numbers were used in which students needed to collaborate in formulating the solution but the final answer would be unique for every member. An online learning platform was used that enables the instructors to measure the performance of students individually and as a part of a team. The studied teaching techniques have been implemented in various engineering classes at different levels (sophomore, junior) and different class sizes (40 to 110 students in each class). The efficacy of active learning on students’ performance was evaluated by comparing the grades on summative assessments with and without applying the active strategies. In addition, surveys were conducted to understand the students' perception of active learning and to identify the learning strategies they considered the most effective. Evaluation of student responses indicates broad agreement on the effectiveness of high-impact learning activities. Key words: Intro to Engineering, Problem based learning, summer camp, High school students 1- Introduction Active learning is a form of teaching and learning method that is developed to improve student learning outcomes, and typically consists of techniques requiring students to be actively engaged in their learning process through specially designed activities, followed by reflection upon what they have done. Bonwell and Eison [1] stated “that in active learning, students participate in the process and students participate when they are doing something besides passively listening." The goal of active learning activities is to actively involve students in the teaching and learning process in order to increase student engagement, performance, and retention [2]. Despite the considerable published research in the literature [3-6] showing the advantage of active learning approaches in STEM and engineering education and its impact on increasing students performance, many instructors still do not implement active learning in their teaching curriculum. The time required to design, implement and revise an active learning curriculum can be restrictive, especially for junior faculty members who are typically struggling with the pre-tenure teaching, research and service expectations. One the other hand, some senior instructors who already shaped their teaching philosophy hesitate to take the risk of redesigning their course curriculum and adopt new teaching and learning strategies due to perceived effort required to implement them and the uncertainties on the outcomes. The advantage of creating a library of active learning activities is to help new instructors to become more effective and efficient in teaching and also to provide senior instructors with some tested activities that they can adopt based on their desires and needs. There have been several efforts in developing a library of active learning activities in various disciplines [7-11] . Bohnhoff and Sample-Lord created a library of group activities to promote active learning in the undergraduate soil mechanics classroom [7]. They reported that active format and activities with real world context increased undergraduate student interest in geotechnical engineering, and that similar strategies could be utilized to develop shareable activity libraries for other engineering disciplines. This research is aimed at developing various active learning activities in engineering mechanics that could be easily adopted by other instructors and evaluate their impact on students’ learning. The developed active learning techniques were implemented in a fundamental core engineering course in sophomore and junior level. The raw exam scores from semesters before the activities were implemented were compared with student performances after implementation of the new active learning format to evaluate whether or not actively engaging the students improved their understanding of the material. After successful implementation of active learning in the mechanics of materials, the same activities were conducted in Aerodynamics 1 to begin to investigate how these activities can be tailored to other subjects and used to improve student performance in a wider variety of engineering courses. 2- Development and Application of Active learning strategies The primary purpose of active learning strategies must be to enhance student learning and a proper active learning activity should be designed in a way to be challenging, interesting, and relevant to course goals and objectives. The studied activity involved conducting practice problems during the class session using a web based polling platform. At the early stage, Kahoot was used for collecting student responses. In the third semester, a dedicated web based platform was developed to assign questions to students, monitor their progress, collect their responses and provide instantaneous feedback. An innovative feature of this study is the developed platform [12] that is developed for administering the activities and collecting data and the ability to easily share the activities with other instructors. During the class session, the instructor spent a short amount of time to expand upon the student learning objectives addressed in the pre-class assigned videos and in demonstration of examples so that students more deeply understood how to apply the concepts. The rest of class was then structured toward active learning, a teaching approach that encompases anything students might be called on to do in class besides watching and listening to an instructor and taking notes [13]. One of the commonly cited challenges with implementing active learning activities is the loss of class time for covering new material. These pre-class assigned videos introduced new material to the students outside of class, so they were prepared to begin applying the