IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jmathe/v9y2021i14p1623-d591495.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effective Pedagogy of Guiding Undergraduate Engineering Students Solving First-Order Ordinary Differential Equations

Author

Listed:
  • William Guo

    (School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Bruce Highway, North Rockhampton, QLD 4702, Australia)

  • Wei Li

    (School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Bruce Highway, North Rockhampton, QLD 4702, Australia)

  • Christopher C. Tisdell

    (School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
    Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation (ITaLI), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia)

Abstract

An alternative pedagogical design is discussed that aims to guide engineering students to solve first-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and is based on students’ learning weaknesses identified from previous teaching and learning activities. This approach supported student’s self-enrichment through exploration of relevant resources in ODEs, and guided students towards the choice of their own effective ways for solving ODEs for different problems. This paper presents the practices on designing and delivering solution techniques for first-order linear ODEs using this approach for more than 400 undergraduate engineering students at a regional university in Australia during 2014–2017. The timeline involved initial experimentation in 2014 and 2015, followed by refinements to the pedagogy based on student’s feedback. The refined pedagogy was then used for the advanced mathematics course in 2016 and 2017. Significant improvements were made in student’s learning outcomes in effectively and accurately solving the first-order linear ODEs over this period.

Suggested Citation

  • William Guo & Wei Li & Christopher C. Tisdell, 2021. "Effective Pedagogy of Guiding Undergraduate Engineering Students Solving First-Order Ordinary Differential Equations," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(14), pages 1-17, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:9:y:2021:i:14:p:1623-:d:591495
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/14/1623/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/14/1623/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:9:y:2021:i:14:p:1623-:d:591495. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.