Effective Pedagogy of Guiding Undergraduate Engineering Students Solving First-Order Ordinary Differential Equations

Abstract

An alternative pedagogical design is discussed that aims to guide engineering students to solve first-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and is based on students’ learning weaknesses identified from previous teaching and learning activities. This approach supported student’s self-enrichment through exploration of relevant resources in ODEs, and guided students towards the choice of their own effective ways for solving ODEs for different problems. This paper presents the practices on designing and delivering solution techniques for first-order linear ODEs using this approach for more than 400 undergraduate engineering students at a regional university in Australia during 2014–2017. The timeline involved initial experimentation in 2014 and 2015, followed by refinements to the pedagogy based on student’s feedback. The refined pedagogy was then used for the advanced mathematics course in 2016 and 2017. Significant improvements were made in student’s learning outcomes in effectively and accurately solving the first-order linear ODEs over this period.

Keywords

• pedagogy
• ordinary differential equations (ODEs)
• advanced mathematics
• implicit solution
• explicit solution
• learning outcomes