A Tutorial Design Process Applied to an Introductory Materials Engineering Course - Abstract and Paper Overview

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Terk

The paper presents a tutorial design process proven effective in physics education, adapted to a university-level introductory materials science and engineering course. The method identifies instructional goals and student difficulties, iteratively designs interactive tutorials, implements interactive group-work recitations, and evaluates outcomes. Across three years and more than 1000 students, extensive interviews, testing, and classroom iterations produced nine field-tested 48-minute tutorials for small-group work with teaching assistants who assess progress.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages38

Reading Time1 h 36 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Tutorials and the Tutorial Design Process

Development of Tutorial Materials and Methods

| | Ad | vances in Engineering Edu | cation | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | WINTER 2013 A Tutorial Design Process Applied to an Introductory Materials Engineering Course REBECCA ROSENBLATT Illinois State University Normal, IL ANDREW F. HECKLER The Ohio State University Columbus, OH AND KATHARINE FLORES Washington University St. Louis, MO ABSTRACT We apply a “tutorial design process”, which has proven to be successful for a number of physics topics, to design curricular materials or “tutorials” aimed at improving student understanding of important concepts in a university-level introductory materials science and engineering course. The process involves the identiﬁcation of instructional goals, the identiﬁcation of speciﬁc student difﬁculties, the iterative design of interactive tutorials, the implementation of interactive group-work recitations, and assessment. The project, which involved over 1000 students, included extensive interviewing, testing, and iterative classroom implementation over a period of three years. Here wereport on some of the identiﬁed student difﬁculties, several of the tutorials designed to address thedifﬁculties, and the results of the implementation. The project has yielded 9 ﬁeld-tested 48 minute tutorials in which students work together in small groups on the tutorials in the presence of teaching assistants who assess and facilitate student progress. To determine the learning outcome, we analyzed ﬁnal exam scores and found that, even accounting for the fact that slightly “better” students tended to attend recitations more often, there was a signiﬁcant valued-added effect of the recitations on ﬁnal exam performance. These results suggest that these recitation methods and materials are effective in teaching students the difﬁcult and important conceptual materials which they were designed to address. Furthermore, since this process was initially designed for physics courses yet is also successful for an engineering course, this implies that this process may be successful for a wide range of STEM courses. WINTER 2013 1 ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION A Tutorial Design Process Applied to an Introductory Materials Engineering Course Key Words: Conceptual difﬁculties, Graphs and diagrams, Group-work, Materials Science, Tutorials INTRODUCTION In the area of physics education, an iterative process of design and implementation of instructional units called “tutorials” has been shown to be very effective in improving student understanding of a wide variety of physics topics. In this paper, we describe the application of a version of this highly successful process to a university-level introductory materials science and engineering course. We begin with a brief general description of the tutorial design process. Following this, the remainder of the paper consists of a description of our application of this process in a multi-year project to design, implement and assess of the effectiveness of tutorials for an introductory course in materials science and engineering. TUTORIALS AND THE TUTORIAL DESIGN PROCESS The process of curricular and instructional development which we will refer to as the tutorial design process was ﬁrst developed and implemented over 20 years ago by the University of Washington’s Physics Education Research group, led by Lillian McDermott (McDermott et al., 2002; McDermott 1991; Shaffer & McDermott, 1992) . It has been applied to numerous topics in Physics including electric circuits (Shaffer & McDermott, 1992), force and motion (e. g., McDermott, Shaffer, & Somers, 1994; Shaffer & McDermott, 2005; Heron et al., 2003), intermediate mechanics,(Ambrose, 2004), geometric optics,(Wosilait et al., 1998), interference and diffraction of light,(Wosilait et al., 1999), pressure,(Loverude, Heron & Kautz, 2010), sound (Wittmann, Steinberg & Redish, 2003), quantum mechanics (Singh, 2008; Wittmann, Morgan & Bao, 2005; B

FAQs

What is the tutorial design process used in this paper?

It involves setting instructional goals, diagnosing specific student difficulties, iteratively designing interactive tutorials, running interactive group-work recitations, and assessing learning outcomes.

How was the approach implemented and evaluated?

The project involved extensive interviewing, testing, and repeated classroom implementation over three years, including assessment using final exam scores.

What learning tools and structure were produced for the course?

The work resulted in nine field-tested 48-minute tutorials where students work in small groups with teaching assistants who assess and facilitate progress.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Terk