Comparative Assessment of Student Performance on Exams when Using Online Homework Tools in an Undergraduate Engineering Mechanics Course

Engineering mechanics courses are vital to the core competencies of engineering students. The objective of this study is to analyze student success in an engineering mechanics course using Mastering Engineering (R) to complete online (electronic) homework as opposed to traditional (written) homework. For this study, 2 different civil engineering instructors compare student data for this engineering mechanics course taught during the spring 2012 semester and summer 2012 mini-mester (3 sessions), thereby sampling a total of 56 students. The instruments used to measure effectiveness were homework assignments and final exam grades, and their effect on the final grades for the course. The homework assignments for this study focused on 2 main topics: 1) structural analysis of trusses, and 2) construction of shear and moment diagrams. The results show that an online instructional tool that supports the facilitation of online (electronic) homework, was used compared to traditional (written) homework, final exam grades on these 2 main topics within engineering mechanics improved by 8.8% and 17.4% for Professor A and B's classes, respectively, and thusly improved final grades by 8.4% and 1.8% for Professor A and B's classes, respectively. In addition to aiding student success, Mastering Engineering (R) proved to be user-friendly for the instructors while providing useful data on how a problem aligned with ABET learning outcomes for assessment, how much time students spent on problems, and how many attempts it took the student to input the correct answer (multiple attempts allowed in this study), which helped the instructors identify topics that seemed to still trouble students for deeper learning and understanding of engineering mechanics concepts. Lastly, this paper reveals some of the student and instructor benefits and challenges experienced when using Mastering Engineering (R) in an undergraduate engineering mechanics course at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).