CIVE 440: Reinforced Concrete Design I: Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (FIRST) Course Portfolio

Authors

Chungwook Sim, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2022

Document Type

Portfolio

Citation

Sim, Chungwook. 2022. CIVE: Reinforced Concrete Design I: Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (FIRST) Course Portfolio. Fall 2022.

Comments

Copyright © 2022 Chungwook Sim

Abstract

This Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (FIRST) Course Portfolio documents the instructor’s teaching practices and student learning for Reinforced Concrete Design I (CIVE 440) course. The contents of this course portfolio captures the CIVE 440 course that was taught on the Lincoln campus during the semester of Fall 2022. CIVE 440 is a structural engineering design elective offered every year in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on both Lincoln and Omaha campus at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The course objective is to help students to be able to use theory and experience to proportion and detail reinforced concrete members such as beams, columns, and one-way slabs. In order to achieve this course objective, teaching methods, course materials, and assessment strategies have been carefully designed and continuously modified throughout multiple semesters. In addition to lectures, peer discussions in class with active learning tools (Plickers; a free paper based online clicker tool), solving and reviewing examples/problems as a group, and in-class reading were utilized as teaching methods. These unique methods are not the conventional way many engineering design courses are typically taught and this course portfolio documents these particular aspects. A mix of formative assessments (recall questions, peer instruction, minute papers, and muddiest point) and summative assessments (fourteen assignments and four exams) were designed and completed for each module in this course to assess the student learning. In addition, for Fall 2022 semester, a modified “specifications grading” of pass/fail grading scheme was used for the assignments in this course which allowed a second attempt if the first trial was failed. This was rather to help students achieve the goal of mastering the learning objectives of each lesson and improve their student learning experiences rather than focusing only on assignment and test scores only. The course assessment data analysis summarizes how these unique teaching methods (peer instruction with Plickers, group activities solving design problems, in-class reading) and different assessment strategies (specifications grading, minute papers, and muddiest points) influenced the student learning. Positive changes are observed in student learning based on their improved formative and summative assessment results compared to the assessments in previous semesters.