Abstract
A retrospective study was conducted on analyzing student performances on the personal energy audit assignment in the renewable energy sources course. We analyzed student scores from 2006, 2009, and 2012 years respectively and categorized them by declared major. In this assignment, we asked our students to calculate the amount of energy that they consumed in one week of their life in college and identify the activities that consumed the largest amount of energy. We also asked them if they would consider any habit changes after completing this assignment. The goal of this assignment was to introduce non-science and engineering students to the concepts of energy, power, electricity, heat, temperature, first and second laws of thermodynamics, embedded energy and world energy consumption. The most common categories included; energy consumed in heating up water, transportation, and electricity. Additionally, on calculating energy used by electricity, we asked the students to confirm their calculations by reading labels and using Kill-a-Watt reading devices. In total, the scores of more than 500 students were evaluated. We found that the average of the scores increased by 19% between 2006 and 2012, and by 14% between 2009 and 2012. Since we used a similar rubric for grading, this shows that the students were able to perform better as we provided more step-by-step instructions, and streamlined the lectures on basic physics and energy concepts in the first three weeks of the course. Moreover, we grouped the student's scores by their declared major. The four categories were engineering, social sciences, natural sciences, and undecided/other majors. We found that in 2006 the students with social science majors on average received the highest scores and in 2009 the students with natural science majors received the highest scores. Interestingly, the students with engineering majors showed the highest improvement in their scores between 2006 and 2012. The paper provides analysis of the student performances on this assignment and the overall effectiveness of this assignment.