ASSESSING TEACHING METHODS FOR A COURSE IN NUMERICAL METHODS

1
ASSESSING IMPACT OF WEB BASED RESOURCES ON
STUDENT LEARNING AND SATISFACTION IN A NUMERICAL
METHODS COURSE Autar Kaw, Melinda Hess, Corina
Owens, University of South Florida Egwu Kalu,
Florida AM University Steven Barnicki, Milwaukee
School of Engineering

• We firmly share the following two philosophies
• We believe in Having open dissemination of
  educational materials, philosophy, and modes of
  thought, that will help lead to fundamental
  changes in the way colleges and universities
  utilize the Web as a vehicle for education MIT
  OCW
• Second, we provide the resources that are
  pedagogically neutral that can be modified to
  suit anyone's needs.
• You NEVER need to login, or enter a password, or
  register.

• Current Education Research Activities
• Inclusion of experiments (report date December
  2008)
• Audiovisual digital content for whole course
  (report date December 2009)
• Blogging on numerical methods (report date
  December 2009)
• Self publishing without giving publishing rights
  (already started)

• Assessment Instruments
• student performance on a 32-question
  multiple-choice examination.
• student satisfaction survey used to gather
  relevant data to evaluate reading assignments,
  class presentations and problem sets.

Abstract Effectiveness of web-based modules
developed for a course in Numerical Methods was
measured via two mixed assessment instruments
1) student performance in a multiple-choice
examination based on Blooms taxonomy, and 2)
student satisfaction survey. Statistical
analysis of the assessment data indicates that
web-based modules for instruction improved both
student performance and satisfaction.
Student Performance Results The final exam
consisted of 32 questions - eight topic areas
each containing four questions. The four
questions were then broken down further into two
questions at the lower levels (knowledge,
comprehension, and application) of Blooms
taxonomy and two questions at the upper levels
(analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) of Blooms
taxonomy.

• Salient Features
• Resources available for numerical methods
• review pre-requisite information via primers
• describe numerical methods through textbook
  notes, presentations, worksheets, and
  multiple-choice questions
• show applications using real-life problems
• use anecdotes to illustrate special topics and
  pitfalls
• give historical perspectives
• incorporate experiments to illustrate use of
  numerical methods
• use blogs to answer questions in plain English.
• Users can choose resources based on a
  computational package MathCAD, Maple,
  MATHEMATICA or MATLAB and engineering major
  Chemical, Civil, Computer, Electrical, General,
  Industrial, or Mechanical Engineering.
• The website was awarded the 2004 ASME Curriculum
  Innovation Award, received the 2006 ASEE DELOS
  Best Paper Award, is ranked 9 out of 2.18
  million hits in Google search for numerical
  methods, and is viewed by more than 100,000
  unique visitors annually.

Based on (Mean Prerequisite GPA) MPGPA, students
were classified into one of three categories
low, medium, and high ability. The low ability
level category was comprised of students in the
25th percentile of the sample (MPGPA 2.25) the
medium ability level category was comprised of
students who scored in the 50th percentile of the
sample (2.25 lt MPGPA 3.25) and the high
ability level category was comprised of students
who scored in the 75th percentile of higher
(MPGPA gt 3.25).