Developing Reasoning Competencies in a Short Introductory Engineering Physics Course

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents the implementation of a scenario posed to freshman engineering students taking an Introductory Physics short course related to Kepler’s Laws for planetary motion. The objective is to guide them to structure a coherent explanation for this scenario. The above is part of the realization of a new educational Tec21 model that Tecnologico de Monterrey has started, where the whole curriculum is focused on challenge-based learning. The emphasis is given to the development of student competencies when real-life situations are faced, in contrast to traditional lecture-based programs. In order to evaluate the student achievement of this competence, a final exam was applied including both standard end-of-the-chapter problems and questions that required higher argumentative thinking levels. The latter was aimed to assess the reasoning followed by students when prompted to analyze different situations from an initial standard context. For a sample of 319 students, it was found that students overall got grades about 20% smaller in the argumentative questions, as compared to the knowledge questions. This can be explained in part due to the fact that most students are only beginning to develop such higher level reasoning and thinking competencies. These results suggest the need to design learning strategies to reinforce the students’ reasoning processes.