Student understanding of pressurized pipeline concepts and the application to conceptual change theory

Anne W. Baghdanov

Background Engineering students struggle with fluid mechanics concepts, including flow in pipelines with a changing diameter. Literature There are competing theories on how to identify and address students’ misconceptions, like those that exist in fluid mechanics for pipeline flow. Limited research exists on student understanding of fluid mechanics, and research is notably lacking in identification of students’ misconceptions in fluid mechanics and the application of broadly accepted conceptual change theories. Research Goals Research was conducted to explore students’ understanding of fluid mechanics concepts. Specifically, the purpose of the research is to (1) investigate student understanding of pressurized pipeline flow, (2) evaluate the consistency of misconceptions between two different interview protocols exploring similar fluid mechanics concepts, (3) evaluate the misconception consistency between two participant groups with varying levels of experience in fluid mechanics, and (4) apply prominent conceptual change theories to the identified misconceptions. v Methodology The participants were interviewed using two distinct interview protocols: one consisted of questions from the Fluid Mechanics Concept Inventory and the other was an open-ended pressurized pipe system. The participants had varying levels of experience in fluid mechanics. Results & Discussion Research showed that students easily understood velocity changes in pressurized pipelines with a changing diameter, but frequently were unable to accurately predict how pressure would change. Furthermore, the data showed that students approached vertical pressurized pipelines differently than horizontal ones, even though they are conceptually the same problem. Two prominent theories on conceptual change were identified to be applicable to the data. Though these theories are appropriate they are individually incomplete in fully explaining the data. The ontological shift theory explained the existence of the two major misconceptions identified in this paper; however, it was unable to explain why both misconceptions are utilized separately for conceptually similar problems. A combination of an ontological shift theory and framework theory provides a more complete understanding of students’ misconceptions in fluid mechanics. Conclusions Using both the ontological shift and framework theory approaches to conceptual change, suggestions on how to implement schema training and active learning are given with the goal of achieving conceptual change in the classroom.

Student understanding of pressurized pipeline concepts and the application to conceptual change theory

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