Replacing Cheating with Metacognition – Reevaluating the Pedagogical Role of Homework in Foundational Engineering Courses

Abstract

In foundational engineering courses such as Statics and Thermodynamics, students often have their first encounter with problems that require more than a simple application of formulas to solve.In these courses, the concepts (e.g.static equilibrium) are often relatively straightforward the difficulty lies in the application of these concepts to complex and varied situations.This approach to problem-solving is a skill which (like any skill) requires personal experience and practice on the part of each student, a behavior which is encouraged through the completion of assigned homework problems.However, typical homework grading policies focus primarily on assessing whether or not the student has achieved the correct answers.While the intent of this focus is to encourage mastery, in practice many students resort to copying the work of other students or of widely-available textbook solution manuals, largely bypassing the critical step of exercising their problem-solving skills in favor of a quick fix.Three years ago, I initiated a shift in homework policies for two courses (Statics and Thermodynamics) taught at a small, primarily undergraduate institution.These policy changes were designed to disincentivize the use of shortcuts by replacing the emphasis on obtaining the correct answer with incentives for students to make their best honest attempt, with an added focus on student metacognition of their problem-solving approach.For these courses, students first submit each homework assignment for grading according to the level of completion of the problems, ignoring whether the correct answer was obtained.The homework is given back within a day, the solutions are released, and by the next class students must complete a metacognitive evaluation of each problem, identifying what they did well and what mistakes were made.This has led to a marked decrease in the number of "cookie-cutter" homework submissions, and as a side effect, has reduced the grading time needed for each assignment.In this paper, I will present the results of a student survey administered in these courses at the end of the Fall 2018 semester.The survey attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of the homework policy on students' perception of their own learning, and to measure student satisfaction as compared to a more traditional homework policy.The results of the survey will be discussed and incorporated into a list of best practices for educators wishing to adopt a similar approach in their own courses.Although the policy was developed for two specific courses, the principles can be extended to many other STEM courses with relative ease.

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