Inconsistencies in Students ’ Approaches to Solving Problems in Engineering Statics

Abstract – This paper looks at students ’ responses to two concept questions: one on equilibrium and one on equi-valence, which is an equilibrium problem from a differ-ent perspective. Student responses were from final exam questions that included explanations and from national Statics Concept Inventory (SCI) data. Examination of students ’ explanations to these two questions shows that students are not consistent in their assessment of force and moment equilibrium, and a mapping of the explana-tions onto the answer distributions implies the same re-sult is true for the national SCI data. The conclusion of this study is that most students are influenced by context when assessing equilibrium. Index Terms – Statics, Specific difficulties, Misconceptions