Learning analytics system to aid students in engineering thermodynamics: Impact of pre-requisite course attainment

Engineering thermodynamics is the core course of many majors, especially mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. Two groups of students from different majors and with different coefficients of difficulty of engineering thermodynamics examinations were selected for investigation. The students’ achievements for the three courses of mathematics, physics, and engineering thermodynamics were analysed, and the relationships between them were concluded. Investigation shows that college-level physics, especially physics 1, plays an important role in improving the study of engineering thermodynamics, and students with a poor physics knowledge foundation have difficulty obtaining scores above the average level in engineering thermodynamics. A strong advanced mathematics foundation is also important to get a good score in engineering thermodynamics. The relationships between the prerequisite courses investigated in this study and engineering thermodynamics are more evident when the engineering thermodynamics examination is difficult and are weak when the engineering thermodynamics examination is easy. Finally, based on the findings, a student learning advising system is proposed, and a feasible implementation method is presented.