Correlation Between Procedural and Conceptual Test in a Statics Course

Due to poor performance in Statics at Eafit University, since 2012 the Mechanical Engineering department implemented a virtual tool for the training and assessment of Statics course. Although the implementation led to better performance in the Statics course, students were still showing lack of comprehension of the basic concepts underlying the subject. The department applied a Concept Inventory test to 195 students from the second semester of 2017 in order to check if there was a correlation between the grades obtained in the class examinations and the performance in a conceptual test of Statics. The Concept Inventory was applied one week before the final examination and it was held inside the University facilities. The students were monitored all the time. For the course examinations were taken only three out of the four partial exams, they were computed and then compared to the results of the concept inventory. The results show that almost all the students with the highest grades in the class performed above the mean in the Concept Inventory. The overall mean for the conceptual test was 9.27 and the standard deviation was 5.28. The course grades were discriminated by career and an Analysis of Variance was conducted to determine if there were significant differences among the groups. A correlation analysis suggests that there is not a strong correlation between the course grades and the concept inventory results. One possible explanation for this can be due to the fact that the regular teaching method for these kind of basic courses in engineering in the University is merely procedural and problem-solving oriented, conceptual approaches are often neglected in both teaching and assessment.