2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research highlights the benefit of student reflection and frequent, formative feedback. One such method is the Muddiest Point exercise where students reflect after instruction about both unclear and interesting points. Then, instructors analyze student feedback for the most popular concepts and select those central to the learning objective. Previously, our work has shown that students feel favorably about the interest, utility, and “cost” associated with this exercise in a one-credit, junior level Statistics course. This work compares student attitude in other courses to discern if the Muddiest Point exercise strategy is universally favorable.

The previously validated, reliable Student Value Survey of Muddiest Points Survey by Carberry, et al. was used to assess student attitude about utility, interest, and cost of this student engagement strategy in the following courses: Biomaterials (BM), Statistics (ST), and Transport Phenomena (TP). Briefly, Transport Phenomena is a three-credit, flipped course for juniors. Biomaterials is a traditionally-taught, three-credit course also at the junior level. After each lecture, students submitted both unclear and most interesting concepts through Blackboard. Following feedback, the instructor analyzed the results and created feedback using a different strategy than previously employed. At the midpoint and end of the semester, students participated in the Student Value Survey. Responses were on a Likert scale where 1 is strongly disagree and 4 is strongly agree. Data from multiple semesters (ST– 4 semesters, TP and BM – 2 semesters) were analyzed. Percentages corresponding to agreement correlate to scores of “3” and “4”. Differences were evaluated using the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test with post-hoc analysis. Previously, comparisons between mid- and final surveys yielded few differences; therefore, this analysis focuses on the post-semester data (nBM = 26, nST = 201, and nTP = 55).

Overall, students felt that the Muddiest Point exercise was interesting (72%-BM, 62%-ST, 65%-TP), useful (98%-BM, 93%-ST, 90%-TP), and did not cost too much in terms of time and emotion (72%-BM, 75%-ST, 70%-TP). Question-by-question investigation showed that students felt favorably with respect to all survey aspects and revealed small but statistically significant differences among classes. More specifically, students in Statistics felt that the Muddiest Point exercise increased their engagement more so than those in the Biomaterials course. Further, students in the Biomaterials and Statistics courses felt that the Muddiest Point exercise allowed them to see real world relevance of the subject matter more so than those in the Transport Phenomena course. There were no other significant differences in question responses among classes. Further, statistical analysis confirmed that there were no differences in the overall categories of “utility”, “interest”, and “cost” (p>0.05) among the selected Biomedical Engineering classes.

This work highlights high student value of the Muddiest Point exercise in Statistics, Biomaterials, and Transport Phenomena courses. Moreover, these results suggest that the Muddiest Point exercise is an effective reflective tool for frequent, formative feedback in any classroom.