The effectiveness of brief, spaced practice on student difficulties with basic and essential engineering skills

Through extensive testing and interviews of sophomore, junior, and senior engineering students in a Materials Science Engineering course at The Ohio State University, we found that these students struggle with many skills necessary for their coursework. Often these “essential skills” were prerequisite to the course and little to no instruction time was spent on them. Online training was developed to attempt to improve these skills. Students participated in the training several times over the term, with each assignment taking 10-20 minutes and consisting of 10 questions. Students were allowed unlimited attempts on each assignment and were required to achieve mastery (80% or better) for full credit. Training covered a wide range of topics: interpreting log plots and log scales, using metric prefixes for various conversions, estimating typical values of common material properties, employing dimensional analysis, and operating equations when given variables in mixed units. Unlike the success achieved by the log plots training, most of the topics saw little and insufficient improvement as a result of training, despite the basic nature of the skills. Future improvements to the training will focus on determining which factors will help to convince students of the importance of mastering these prerequisite skills.