What Sticks When the Dust Settles: Evaluating the Retention of Concepts and Thought Processes with Think-aloud Interviews

A foundational goal of deliberately designed educational experiences is for learners to acquire and to retain knowledge and thinking skills. Common modes of assessment such as exams administered during the semester may measure students' short-term achievement of learning objectives. However, they do not identify the underlying knowledge gaps, misconceptions, or thought processes responsible for students' errors. In addition, such tests do not yield information on students' retention of skills beyond the conclusion of the course. Such limitations make it difficult to optimize learning activities for long-term retention of concepts and skills that are crucial to problem solving activities in engineering courses. Think-aloud interviews provide rich qualitative data about students' thought processes in verbal form that are not available from multiple-choice or free-response type of assessments. In this work-in-progress paper we present a set of think-aloud interviews with senior-level mechanical engineering students as they take a concept inventory assessment on introductory fluid mechanics and mechanics of engineering materials. Participants took these two courses in their junior year, at the end of which they took the same concept inventory tests, but not in a think-aloud format. We explain how our interview data is used to identify students' knowledge gaps or misconceptions.