Session M4H

978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX

39
th
ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
M4H-1
Work in Progress - Developing Warm-Up
Questions for Strength of Materials

Janet M. Braun and Jeffrey L. Newcomer
Western Washington University, Janet.Braun@wwu.edu, Jeff.Newcomer@wwu.edu


Abstract This paper outlines our preliminary efforts to
develop warm-up questions for Strength of Materials.
These are conceptual questions that students answer
before the topics the questions cover are introduced in
class. The warm ups give instructors an idea of what
students conceptions are before discussion begins, so the
instructor can directly address students specific difficul-
ties as the topic is introduced. The questions that we are
developing are still in flux, but our preliminary results
indicate that while students remember some relevant
information from the prerequisite Materials Science
course, they have trouble knowing when to apply it.

Index Terms up to four words
INTRODUCTION
Understanding students conceptual difficulties with engi-
neering topics is necessary to allow faculty to improve
course materials and teaching methods [1]. There have been
widespread and significant efforts to develop concept inven-
tories for different engineering topics for use in assessment,
such as the Statics Concept Inventory [2]-[3]. These concept
questions, however, are also useful if employed throughout
the duration of a course to provide faculty with insight into
students specific difficulties [4]. Warm up questions are a
well established method for gaining this information [5].
To this end, we are in the process of developing a set of
conceptual warm-up questions for Strength of Materials
(SOM). These questions cover nine topic areas that are
synchronized with the course lecture. At Western Washing-
ton University (WWU), students enrolled in Manufacturing
Engineering Technology (ET), Plastics ET, and Industrial
Technology with specialization in either Vehicle Design or
CAD/CAM are required to take SOM. Students complete
the warm-up questions prior to the topic being covered in
class, so faculty are able to use the students responses to
address specific difficulties that are common as new material
is introduced. We are currently developing the second itera-
tion of these questions, incorporating what we learned from
the first iteration.
A few others have attempted to develop concept
questions for or to more thoroughly understand students
conceptual difficulties with SOM, but the attempts are very
preliminary, focused differently than our efforts, or have
been abandoned [6]-[8]. Our initial results indicate that
students bring with them certain biases, most likely from
their introductory Materials Science course that, along with
Physics, Calculus, and Statics, is a pre-requisite for SOM.
Within the ET department, extensive research has been con-
ducted by Kitto on methods to improve conceptual under-
standing of Materials Science [9]. One example where this
understanding of a Materials Science concept may have
created a bias in students response is that heating a part is
more strongly associated with the material softening than the
part expanding and that stress and deflection are not strongly
related as being proportional to each other. We are, howev-
er, continuing to modify the questions and collect student
responses in order to confirm that we are building valid
models of common specific difficulties. We will describe
the topics, two of the questions, and some of the findings
from our preliminary work.
WARM-UP TOPICS
The goal of the warm ups is to provide the course instructor
with some idea of student conceptions on a topic before the
topic is covered. That way the instructor can directly ad-
dress any common difficulties that appear in the students
responses. As such, the warm-up topics were selected to
match the lecture topics. The warm-up topics are:

1. Thermal stress and expansion
2. Shear due to torsion
3. Shear forces and bending moments in beams
4. The effect of beam cross sections on stress and def-
lection
5. Axial stress distribution in beams
6. Shear stress distribution in beams
7. Beam deflection
8. Combined loadings
9. Buckling
PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
The majority of the warm ups contained two or three ques-
tions for students to answer. The questions are open-ended
rather than multiple-choice. We are developing multiple
choice questions, using students incorrect answers to help
us develop the distractors. Here are two examples of res-
ponses to warm up that we believe provide some insight into
student thinking.
Figure 1 shows the image for Warm Up 1. The question
asked students to consider the changes to stress and deflec-
tion in both beams as the temperature increased, with beam
A free to expand, but beam B constrained at both ends. The
Session M4H
978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX
39
th
ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
M4H-2
students responses regarding the stresses were mildly inter-
esting. Of the thirty-two students who completed this warm
up, thirteen correctly identified that beam B would see an
increase in stress, but beam A would not; seven indicated
that temperature changes do not affect stress, for stress is
force over area; and seven indicated that the material would
soften as it heated, so the beams would start to sag. This last
group of students increased to fifteen when they were asked
to consider deflection, while only eight students answered
the question correctly. The students concerned with the
material softening highlighted a focus in their thinking.
They were all aware that materials will eventually soften as
the temperature gets high enough, and with gravity pulling
perpendicular to the main axis of the beam the beam will
eventually sag, and they were more concerned with this than
with stress and elongation. In the second iteration we li-
mited the amount of temperature change and reoriented the
picture so that the beams are vertical, and student responses
were more focused on the issues of interest.
FIGURE 1
BEAMS FOR WARM UP 1.

Figure 2 shows the figure for Warm Up 4. The ques-
tions asked students to consider if the three different cross
sections, that all have the same area, would lead to different
stress or deflection for the simply supported and loaded
beam. Of the twenty-six students who completed this warm
up, nineteen indicated that the deflection would vary due to
the different distribution of areas, with general agreement
that cross section 2 would deflect the most, but some disa-
greement as to whether cross section 1 or 3 would deflect the
least. The results for stress, however, were very different.
Fourteen students indicated that the stress would be the same
for all three cross sections, since the areas are the same, yet
ten of these fourteen students indicated that the deflections
would be different for the different cross sections. This
result is consistent with student responses on the first warm
up and with findings in [6]. Many students know that stress
is force over area, but they do not understand the idea well
enough to know how to apply it in indirect loading situa-
tions. Moreover, none of the students thought to relate stress
to strain or deflection through the material stiffness, so the
question did not invoke them to think about that relationship
and the possible contradiction of having the same stress but
different deflections.

FIGURE 2
LOADING AND BEAM CROSS-SECTIONS FOR WARM UP 4.

It seems clear from these two warm ups, and it was rein-
forced by others, that students remember some things from
their prerequisite engineering materials class very well, but
many of them to do not know when to apply them.
FUTURE WORK
Our intention at this point is to continue to refine the warm
ups so that we can create a stable set that can be used to
reliably inform instructors as to what specific difficulties
students have as a new SOM topic is introduced. Once we
have stable questions we will begin to collect data to see if
there are consistent patterns in different groups of students.
REFERENCES
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Co., November 5-8, 2003, pp. T4G-1-8
[3] Steif, P. S., and Dantzler, J. A., A Statics Concept Inventory: Devel-
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[4] Newcomer, Jeffrey L., Many Problems, One Solution Method:
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