Abstract:

To determine how much students have performed in terms of learning it is not enough to assess their knowledge only during/at the end of the course. It is well known that learning process relies on the transfer of prior knowledge. Under this aspect, learning may be impeded by the absence of prior knowledge, a deficient transfer of such or from faulty concept models of the students. In this paper we share our experience in designing a Materials Science Threshold Concepts Quiz as a direct method to determine Mathematics background knowledge in students from Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) enrolled in Materials Science subject. A ten-item multiple-choice quiz was developed regarding threshold Mathematics concepts for Materials Science course, and it was applied to 250 students enrolled at two faculties, namely Design Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Both student focus groups belonged to second year, first semester. The proposed instrument was tested during 2022-2023 academic course. The quiz was voluntary, anonymous and the obtained qualification was not considered for the course grade. Subsequently, the Quiz results were compared considering the students’ major (Faculty) while the obtained qualification was related to the student performance during the course, namely at midterm exams. The obtained results allowed to relate the student preparedness and areas of weakness of the class from Design Engineering and Industrial Engineering. The study concludes with proposing several strategies to improve the student performance.

Keywords:

Materials science course, mathematics, concept quiz, threshold knowledge, evaluation.