Work in progress: First-year engineering students development of test cases for model development

Abstract

When developing mathematical models for authentic problems that draw on basic descriptive statistics, many first-year engineering students do not address data distribution when it is appropriate to do so. An assignment was created in association with such a problem that asks students to develop their own test cases as a means of getting students to think more deeply about the data provided and the models they are developing. In this work in progress, these test cases are analyzed. The means and standard deviations of the test cases are quite different than those provided with the problem. However, there is evidence that students may not be attending to the original problem context. Next steps are briefly indicated.