“Use of POGIL Methodology in Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Courses”

Abstract "Use of POGIL Methodology in Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering Courses" By Jeffrey N. Phillips Hanover College Hanover, Indiana, USA Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, or POGIL, was first developed in the early 2000s as method for improving the understanding of introductory level college Chemistry classes and proved to provide a significant increase in the percentage of students who mastered the course materials. POGIL has since expanded to be used in a wider variety of STEM classes, but, to the author's knowledge, no professor has tried using POGIL in undergraduate Engineering Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer classes. This paper will provide an overview of the POGIL approach, which uses small teams of students to explore concepts and to solve problems with the instructor acting as a facilitator. It will also report on the results of an initial use of POGIL in Hanover College Engineering classes in the Winter, Spring, and Fall 2021 semesters. These results will be compared to the results from the previous offering of this courses which used a traditional lecture-based approach. To minimize other potential influences on the student outcomes, the same textbooks in both the traditional classes and the POGIL classes. Also, the author was the instructor in each of the classes. In addition to looking at student outcomes such as course grades and course evaluations, the paper will also share examples of the POGIL exercises worked on by the student teams.