Student Perceptions of Technological Literacy Learning with Cumulative and Stepwise Integration of Equations into Engineering Diagrams

Teaching basic engineering principles and problem solving with equations and schematic diagrams to non-engineering students is a basic goal of technological literacy education. The goals of this experimental study were to investigate the effects of the integration of equations into diagrams on the engineering learning and learning perceptions of non-engineering undergraduate students. Three integration designs were compared: cumulative integration where equations were cumulatively integrated into the circuit diagram, step-wise integration where only the equations relevant to the present step of the problem were integrated into the circuit diagram, and non-integrated presentation where all equations were displayed in an adjacent frame. Student learning was measured with a problem-solving near-transfer and far-transfer posttest (and reported in detail in a recent article). This paper focuses on the student perceptions of the helpfulness of the diagrams and difficulty of the instructional program and the open-ended student feedback. Results indicated that students in the cumulative integrated condition rated the diagrams significantly more positively and significantly more frequently expressed liking of the engineering domain in the open-ended feedback than students in the non-integrated condition. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that engineering instruction for non-engineering students should integrate equations into diagrams in a cumulative fashion so as to avoid the split-attention effect and frustrations due to mapping between diagrams and separate equation displays.