Using online and hands-on activities to improve self-efficacy in mechanics.

Our study is an evaluation of an introductory solid mechanics course incorporating a pedagogical reform using concepts of active-learning. The focus is on exploring if online activities promote better understanding of conceptual fundamental knowledge of introductory solid mechanics, as well as enhance mechanics-concepts self-efficacy for students. Introductory mechanics courses have long been focused on mathematical and theoretical concepts, and traditionally these courses have been shown to be biased toward instructor engagement versus student engagement. Many studies have reported that this bias creates a gap between instructors' teaching styles and students' learning styles. Despite this discrepancy, many introductory mechanics courses are still taught passively focusing on note-taking, which is believed to play a role in the contribution of students' self-efficacy to persist in their engineering studies as well as in their engineering career choices. Self-efficacy, which is a person's belief in his or her own ability, has been shown to be highly correlated with an individual's performance level. With high self-efficacy, a student will use more cognitive resources and more effective metacognitive strategies and will more likely select challenging tasks than students with lower self-efficacy. Upon encountering a problem, an individual with higher self-efficacy is often more persistent in problem solving than a student with lower self-efficacy. This paper presents an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching an introductory mechanics course, which included weekly lectures, in-class activities, online activities, and hands-on lab exercises. The goal of this paper is to assess the impact of online activities on students' self-efficacy of mechanics concepts, as well as to track students' efficacy levels at various points during the course offering. Several factors, such as students' gender, major, and the education of their parents associated with sense of selfefficacy in the concepts learned are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]