Abstract:

With advancing times and changing minds, it becomes imperative to apply new ways of teaching to help the students in grasping the knowledge more effectively. There have been many approaches that have been followed by instructors worldwide to make the transfer of knowledge more efficient. One such approach is inquiry-based learning (IBL), a pedagogy built around students and their desire for knowledge. This active learning method encourages students to ask questions, explore, investigate, and effectively utilize resources outside the limitations of a classroom. IBL focuses on stimulating learning by inquiry and enables students to apply concepts in their daily lives. IBL is centered around four main principles: deep learning, collaboration, instructor inquiry into thinking, and equity. There are four main types of IBL: the structured inquiry approach, the open-ended inquiry approach, the problem-based inquiry approach, and the guided inquiry approach. Moreover, the concept of IBL can be applied in a plethora of ways, however the 5E model proves to be the most effective. The 5E model is composed of five stages: engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation, which aims to establish a complete and cohesive student education with teaching new knowledge and skills. It is to be noted that, currently, inquiry-based learning is widely being used in primary and secondary schools, but is scarcely entertained in higher education, which includes the undergraduate and postgraduate level. Hence, this paper focuses on sharing the author’s experience in implementing inquiry-based learning in teaching a statistics course to senior undergraduate Mechanical Engineering students at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, KSA. The current study shall present the implementation of the 5E IBL model to the various modules taught in the course titled, Design and Analysis of Engineering Experiments (ME451). The course is all about statistically designing and analyzing the data of engineering experiments to make meaningful conclusions. The students taking this course in their final year, lack proper background in statistics as they do not take any statistical course prior to this, which makes the teaching of this course quite challenging. Hence in view of these challenges, it was decided to implement IBL in teaching this course to make it more interesting and engaging, which was reflected quite well in the feedback received from the students at the end of the semester. The average performance of the students also showed a significant jump as compared to previous semesters after the implementation of IBL. Hence this paper aims to present the framework of implementing IBL to courses taught to undergraduate engineering students in general, to help and guide instructors who are planning to do so in their respective courses.

Keywords:

Inquiry-based learning, Statistics, Mechanical Engineering.