Second Modified Student Presentation Based Effective Teaching (SPET) Method Tested in COVID-19 Affected Senior Level Mechanical Engineering Course

Student presentation based effective teaching (SPET) approach was designed to engage students with different mindsets and academic preparation levels meaningfully and meet several ABET student learning outcomes. SPET method requires that students prepare themselves by guided self-study before coming to the class and make presentations to teach the whole class by (a) presenting complex concepts and systems appealingly and engagingly, and (b) serving as the discussion platform. In class, SPET presentations address the conceptual questions that are assigned 1-2 weeks before the presentation day. However, the SPET approach becomes impractical for large class sizes due to the reasons that (i) during one class period all the students can not present, (ii) many students do not make their sincere efforts. They are inclined to take credit from others’ work. In prior work (P.Tyagi, Proc. ASME. IMECE2016, Volume 5: Education and Globalization, V005T06A026, November 11–17, 2016), we published the original SPET concept. Afterward, in the follow-up work(P. Tyagi, Proc. ASME. IMECE2018, Volume 5: Engineering Education, V005T07A035, November 9–15, 2018) we reported the first modified SPET approach to address the limitations. However, the first modified SPET approach for the  20+ senior-level enrollment suffered from the following limitations.  (1) All the students did not make a significant effort to understand the course content to answer the assigned questions for in-class presentations because they were not required to attend all the questions assigned before the class. (2) All the students in a group did not understand the content assigned to other members in their group and frequently showed ignorance about the portion covered by other members.  This paper focuses on the second modification of SPET to make it practical for large classes. The method reported in this paper was tested for two years on MECH 462 Design of Energy System Course. Under the recently modified scheme, SPET based sessions are conducted twice a week. Students were assigned the conceptual questions about the target content or chapter 1-2 weeks before. Unlike the first modified approach, under the second modified approach, all the students were expected to submit the response to the preassigned questions before coming to the class for the group presentation. In class, SPET group presentations were prepared by the group of 3-6 students who prepared themselves by doing SPET conceptual questions individually.  Students communicated with each other to make a cohesive presentation for ~30 min. In two classes per week, we covered 5-6 group presentations to do enough discussions and repetition of the core concepts for a more in-depth understanding of the content. In the class, students gave a group presentation. During the presentation, each student was evaluated for (a) their depth of understanding, (b) understanding other parts of the presentation covered by other teammates and (c) quality of presentation and content. These individual submissions were graded after the in-class presentation. The student who appeared unprepared in the class group presentation were given more attention during individual assignment grading. This second modified SPET approach carries most of the original attributes, such as enhancing student technical communication skills, quick feedback, and repeating the complex concepts 4-5 times from multiple perspectives to foster deep learning.