Development, implementation, and assessment of a bending stress tutorial

Results from engineering concept inventories indicate that students´ conceptual understanding of engineering concepts is very poor. The research described herein is based on the development, implementation, and assessment of a tutorial consisting of inquiry based problem solving and ranking tasks to assist students in developing conceptual understanding of stresses due to bending in MOM. This tutorial was implemented in one section of MOM and another different section of MOM was used as a control group. Select questions from the MOM concept inventory (CI) were given to students in both sections. Contrary to the researcher´s expectations, students in the control group performed better on two of five questions on the CI at a statistically significant level. Performance on the tutorial does not provide explanatory power to the difference in concept inventory results. Results of this research reveal concerns when implementing curricular materials to improve students´ conceptual understanding.