Improving the perception of preventive maintenance: Contextual-based collaborative learning model for mechanical engineering students

Machine maintenance is the means by which mechanical assets in a facility are kept running with their optimal working performance in their lifetime. In order to be able to carry out machine maintenance work properly, an engineering graduate as one of the maintenance staff must understand the concept of machine maintenance correctly. Through machine maintenance and repair learning material, mechanical engineering students were provided with knowledge of the mechanical maintenance concept and it's implementing activities. Since the learning materials of mechanical maintenance concept and its activities are theoretical mostly, most the students have difficulties in learning the topic and they tend to memorize the subjects. That circumstance caused a low understanding of the concept of machine maintenances on students. Based on the literature study and prior research one of the methods that can be used to improve students' understanding of theoretical learning materials is through the application of the most proper learning model suitable to the learning topics. The purpose of this study is to obtain information on students' perceptions of the machine preventive maintenance concept and its activities through the application of a contextual-based collaborative learning model for mechanical engineering students. The Quasi-experimental method with two groups of pre-test and post-test design was adopted for this research. The study involved 65 mechanical engineering students which were divided into two groups, namely the control and the experimental classes. The control class is a group of students who carry out teaching and learning by a teacher-centered learning strategy, while the experimental class is a group of students that receive learning treatments using a contextual-based collaborative learning model. Next, to investigate the learning model effects statistical parametric analysis was carried out at pretest and posttest results of both two classes. The "Normalized gain" analysis result of both two classes was obtained as follows: the control class score was 0. 23 while the experiment class' Gain score was 0.73. Based on these study showed that the gain of the experiment class is higher than the control class. The value 0f 0.73 indicate that the contextual-based collaborative learning model is effective in increasing students' understanding of mechanical maintenance learning materials.