New Perspectives in Science Education

At Offenburg University, the dropout rates in engineering study programs are clearly higher than the German average. One of the main reasons to this is a dramatically increasing heterogeneity in freshmen’s study preconditions and motivation caused by the no enrollment restrictions policy in most of the study programs.

The subject group Mechanics is a “classical horror subject of engineering education”. It has a significant share in the introductory study period of engineering programs: It is taught in all of the first three semesters of Bachelor’s programs. In Offenburg, general study performance and pass/dropout rates are strongly related to the successful completion of the Mechanics courses.

Teaching Mechanics to a group of students with very different pre-knowledge and motivation is a real challenge. Still, after several years of hitting and missing, the lectures in Mechanics 1 (Statics) become a real success story constantly earning the full marks in students’ performance and satisfaction (100%).

A totally different situation arose with the lectures in Mechanics 2 (Elastostatics) which was added to the lecturer’s workload in 2013. Given the workload of 18 SWS (9 lectures of 90 min. each weekly), which is a regular teaching load at Universities of Applied Sciences in Germany, no lecturer can be didactically good at a new course in the first go. To help a bit, the lecturer was given two parallel groups in this particular semester. One group which was very nice and fully satisfied with the lectures in Mechanics 1 by the said lecturer in the previous semester became totally monstrous and uncontrollable in Mechanics 2 which resulted in an extremely low evaluation of 25%. Quite on the contrary, another group was completely satisfied with the same lectures (100%). Interestingly, this latter group experienced a total disaster with Mechanics 1 lectures delivered by another lecturer in a previous semester (practically all the students failed the exam). Probably for this reason, they were taken Mechanics very seriously at last and thankful for very help.

Three lines of action were taken:

1.     The reasons for success of the lectures in Mechanics 1 were analyzed. They were found to lay with the model-based teaching method with makes the subject almost tangible. Quite a number of such models were developed and have been built for Mechanics 2. Even with most of them not working properly yet, this helped a lot.

2.     A recently appointed highly-qualified pedagogue was called in to help to appropriately deal with the code-of-conduct issues.

3.     Colleagues were asked to audit the lectures, give feed back to the lecturer and the students as well as consider other presumptive reasons.

The actions helped: In the summer semester 2015 the students’ satisfaction hit the incredibly high mark of 100%.