Abstract:

As professors, one of the most important roles that we have is to encourage learning environments so that our students achieve meaningful learning. In the Faculty of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (known in Spanish as UNAM), a group of engineering and pedagogy professors have worked in an interdisciplinary project associated with a “Project Support Program for Innovation and Improvement of Teaching” (PAPIME for its Spanish acronym); this project is entitled "Factors involved in the teaching of Engineering Thermodynamics causing difficulty in teaching and learning" with the purpose, among other things, to establish some strategies that promote learning in the aforementioned subject and thus improve the accreditation index.

For this, in this project some questionnaires have been designed and applied both to teachers who teach the subject and to students who are studying it or who already attended it in order to detect the main causes that hinder the teaching-learning process in the Thermodynamics course. This has allowed to establish certain strategies proposals to achieve a significant learning in the students that take this course.

The information collected and analyzed through these questionnaires highlights that for most of the students surveyed (63%) the difficulty level in the subject is high and a preponderant factor for this statement is the lack of background covered in previous courses. It also stands out that an aspect that does not favor the learning of the concepts seen in class is the weak relation between the theoretical aspects and the experimental activity carried out in the laboratory associated to the subject. Also, according to the surveyed students, when they were studying the subject, their main expectations were to learn, to pass the course, to know how to apply the concepts seen in class, as well as to have clarity in these.

Semesters after having completed the course they were given another questionnaire to know what skills they had developed after completing it. We can mention that, in their own opinion, they managed to develop their capacity for analysis, observation, logical reasoning and problem solving.

Although the causes that inhibit the teaching-learning process are not few, through the questionnaires applied it was possible to detect which are the main ones and, focusing on them, we were able to propose concrete strategies, in the Thermodynamics, that remedy those difficulties thus notably improving the teaching-learning process in students who seek to train as future high-quality engineers.

The following article shows some of the strategies that the group of teachers involved have implemented to promote that students acquire a significant learning in this subject, since Thermodynamics is an area of Physics difficult to understand.

Keywords:

Thermodynamics, strategies, teaching-learning process, engineer.