Because a freshman-level introductory engineering course is typically one of few courses used in fulfilling a broad set of technical and non-technical program learning outcomes (i.e. for ABET accreditation purposes), a significant challenge involved in designing and teaching such courses is to cover a broad array of topics in a way that is engaging and beneficial to students. We revamped the freshman-level introductory engineering course at CSU-East Bay to better suit this purpose, and in this work, we focused on obtaining a deeper understanding of student learning across a set of six technical and non-technical concepts. We evaluated the relationship between student performance on each concept with the students' final course performance, and found that students who perform well on the technical concepts generally have better final course performance. We also investigated how performance on each concept affects performance on other concepts. We found that there is significant correlation between performances across a couple of concepts, and lack of significant correlation between most other concepts. This suggests that there are concept-specific tools and skillsets allowing students to attain proficiency in each concept, and learning the tools and skillsets for one concept may not benefit performance on other concepts. Students also performed significantly better on the non-technical concepts compared to the technical concepts. Deeper understanding of the difficulties facing the students in the technical concepts would benefit students in future iterations of the course.
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Lei et al. (2017) studied this question.