Step-Based Tutoring Approach for a Key Foundational Course in Electrical Engineering

Linear circuit analysis is a central course not only for electrical engineers but for many other engineering majors as well, where it is frequently required for graduation. Promoting and supporting student success is therefore crucial. Here, we describe a national award-winning* software project to develop, disseminate, and rigorously evaluate a freely available step-based tutoring system called Circuit Tutor for linear circuit analysis courses (www.circuittutor.com). To date, the system has been used by over 14,500 students at 18 different colleges & universities by 83 distinct instructors teaching 394 class sections and has shown learning gains up to 1.21σ in comparison to paper or commercial homework systems in nine rigorous randomized, controlled trials. It accepts and provides immediate feedback on every major step of a student's work, such as re-drawing & simplifying circuit diagrams on the screen, sketching waveforms, drawing plots of frequency response, entering equations with a template-based interface, etc., all with immediate feedback to minimize frustration. It randomly generates an unlimited supply of topologically unique problems and fully worked examples for every student and has been shown to strongly promote academic integrity. A total of 30 different tutorial "games" is included in the system covering all major topics in this area. It provides carefully graded levels of difficulty and is supported by interactive, multiple-choice introductory tutorials (equivalent to a free textbook) on every topic and over 100 YouTube videos illustrating the interfaces and how to solve all problem types. It creates PDF transcripts of student work for use in studying. The system has been used extensively at community colleges and seven minority-serving institutions and for online education. It has undergone rigorous independent evaluation by the College Research and Evaluation Services Team (CREST) at ASU, showing very positive outcomes. This work has also contributed numerous new advances in the foundations of circuit analysis, such as a strongly improved definition of series connections of circuit elements, extension of mesh analysis to nonplanar circuits and the use of a reference mesh to ensure its duality with nodal analysis, and new methods of circuit simplification including concepts of hinged, voltage- and current-splittable circuits, which will be discussed. A live demonstration of the system will be provided. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through Grants No. 1044497, 1323773, and 1821628.