Enhancing Thermodynamics Learning with a Modified Lab Experiment

Abstract Specific heat is one of the difficult topics in thermodynamics. Due to its abstract concept and theoretical nature, students could easily get lost during a typical PowerPoint lecture and found it difficult to solve related problems in homework and exams. Even when students could follow the steps to finish their homework, they felt challenged to connect the concept with real-life applications. It showed that the passive learning format is not effective in teaching this subject. To improve the student learning, we added an active learning element in the lab portion of the course by modifying some of the experiments. In many published conference papers, the active learning has shown being effective in improving student learning. In this paper, we would like to share with our ASEE community with what we did and learned from this work, and to seek feedback on this newly established active learning approach for our future research activities in other engineering courses. The lab component of this course consists of about 10 different experiments. Once a week, students were divided into small sections and conduct the experiments under the guidance of the lab instructor. The active learning element was added after the experiment on latent heat. Upon completing this latent heat experiment, students were asked to design a new lab experiment to measure the specific heat of several commonly used construction materials and by using the measurement tools they learned from the just finished latent heat experiment. Once the measurement data were collected, they were asked to conduct related analysis and answer questions designed to reflect their understanding of the concepts and the ability to draw meaningful conclusions. This new lab experiment also fulfills one of the seven ABET learning outcome assessment requirements. Before this new student-designed lab experiment on specific heat, a FE type quiz was given to the students during the lecture time. After the new lab experiment, the students were tested again with a similar quiz to gauge the improvement on their learning. Another survey question was also given before and after the new lab experiment to assess their understanding of the concept from the students' perspective. The before and after quiz results showed 20% improvement on students' problem-solving skills related to specific heat. 95% of the students felt that, after this new and student designed experiment, they had a much better understanding on the topic.