Integrated Programs And Cultural Literacies: Using Writing To Help Engineering Students Transition To Cultural Literacies Of College

As educators who work with first-year students, we are all well aware of how difficult some students find the transition to college, particularly first-year engineering students. Of course, some students fail because they are ill prepared for the courses they are taking. Others are too easily distracted by their newfound freedoms. Nevertheless, there is a body of students whose ACT/SAT scores and high school grades suggest that they should easily adapt to the college environment, and yet some of these students do poorly. Our experience in teaching the integrated program suggests that these students experience difficulty in their freshman year because they feel threatened by the new learning environments, teaching methods, and demands that they are experiencing, and they often have problems adapting to these. In developing our ideas for integrated modules for the first-year program, we discovered that this notion of transition was important in all the classes. In English, for example, students need to abandon those techniques such as the “five-paragraph theme,” which may have worked for them in the past. Similarly, in engineering, students need to abandon their linear problem-solving techniques that have worked in the past and allow themselves to spend more time on generating multiple solutions. Both changes are part of what we might call the “cultural literacies” of the subject æthat is, the “different sets of reading, writing, thinking, listening, and behavioral skills that make up the numerous communities of the academic world and beyond.” 1 Therefore, one of our writing assignments helps students transition to the cultural literacies involved in college. In this assignment, we ask students to examine the various changes they are experiencing and to determine the reasons they need to make these changes for success in their first-year courses. The assignment then asks students to internalize and apply those changes. In this paper, we will discuss the kinds of transitions students need to make, and we will explain how the assignment we have developed helps students to internalize those transitions. Introduction: The Integrated Program The Freshman Integrated Program in Engineering (FIPE) at Arizona State University, which was developed through funding partnerships with the National Science Foundation P ge 781.1 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2002, American Society for Engineering Education sponsored Foundation Coalition, is a course for first-year engineering students that integrates engineering, calculus, physics, and English Composition. Our integration has involved using the first-year-engineering course (delivered both semesters) as an umbrella so that each of the other courses integrates with engineering. While many students have been successful in the program, we have seen that some students perform less well than standard indicators suggest they should. We realized that for these students, their failure stemmed not from an inability to do the work, but rather from their inability to adapt to the varying literacies required in the disparate courses they encounter in their freshman year. In this paper, we will address the transitions first-year students must make when they enter engineering and show how assignments in Freshman English can be developed to help students understand what those transitions are and how they must adapt to succeed in the university communities they encounter. Background to the Problem Retention of freshmen has become a focus in our nation today because of the high rate of attrition at many college universities. One university that has a particular concern about retention is Arizona State University, a public institution that is mandated to provide an education for as many students as possible, resulting in an acceptance rate of 80%. The lower freshmen retention rate of 74% and even less impressive graduation rate of under 50% in 6 years at ASU suggests that this high rate of acceptance also poses real challenges for ASU educators to help with student persistence. One way that ASU has met these challenges is to build programs for freshmen that provide intervention to increase the retention rate, such as the Academic Success at the University (UNI 100), Summer Bridge programs, and other learning community programs, such as the Freshman Retention Effort in Engineering Housing. P ge 781.2 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2002, American Society for Engineering Education Because engineering is one of those fields in which less than half of the students who begin their studies in engineering actually graduate in the field, ASU has also encouraged fostering programs, such as the Freshmen Integrated Program in Engineering (FIPE). In addition to delivering course content in which concepts are integrated among the various classes, instructors in this program also recognize the importance of helping students adapt in the first few weeks, which research indicates is the most important determinant of whether a student will persist and succeed or leave the university. These adaptations include social, emotional, and academic transitions. Thus, researchers have noted a perceived lack of social support correlates to higher student attrition rates. In fact, even though academic ability may predict retention, emotional and social adjustment also predicts attrition. Furthermore, while some students take the transition to college life in stride, others are overwhelmed and may drop out. 5 Such students may require counseling and other services to handle the emotional transition, which may result in improved retention rates. Another important area of retention research focuses on academic transitions, and includes student adaptation to the theoretical and abstract subject matter common in university classes. In response to the findings of this research, universities have created various academic support services including tutoring centers and mentoring programs designed to help students adjust to the higher expectations of the university. In addition to the problems outlined above, students often feel threatened by unfamiliar learning environments in which there are different teaching methods and classroom management. Further their own learning styles are incompatible with teaching methods of their instructors. To understand the challenges students face in their transitions into the cultural literacies of college, P ge 781.3 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2002, American Society for Engineering Education we considered Felder and Silverman’s index of learning styles (ILS). They identify preferences for learning as Active-Reflective, Sensing-Intuitive, Visual-Verbal, and Sequential-Global. Felder identifies active learners as those who like to experiment with working things out working with others, while reflective learners are those who prefer thinking things out and working by themselves. Sensing learners prefer collecting facts and following procedures, while intuitive learners are more oriented toward concepts, theories, and significance of meaning. Felder describes visual learners as those who prefer visual representations and verbal learners those who prefer written and spoken explanations. And finally, Felder considers sequential learners as those who are more orderly and linear in their thinking, who like to learn in small steps, compared to global learners, who are more holistic in their thinking and prefer to learn in large leaps. Description of the Problem We agree with Felder that adjusting teaching approaches and methods to improve student retention helps, but these changes do not address the core academic problem: incoming students do not understand how to negotiate the various academic communities they will encounter. In each of these communities are different sets of reading, writing, thinking, listening, and behavioral skills, often defined as cultural literacies, and the student needs not only to recognize that these different communities exist but also to learn how to work within these communities. However, what many students do is try to make each different academic community fit with the individual approach to reading, writing, and learning that has consistently worked for them in the past. For example, most educators recognize that writing a research report in one of the social sciences, such as Communications, requires a different approach than P ge 781.4 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ©2002, American Society for Engineering Education would be needed if one were writing an analysis of a particular poet for a class in English literature. The types of research, what constitutes evidence, the databases consulted, the vocabulary, the genre of the paper, and even the style manual would all differ. But we often forget that our students have not encountered these differences, and when they try to write a report for one subject using the approach they have always used successfully in another subject, they are almost certainly bound to fail. Nor are these differences limited to writing. When, for example, students try to solve the more complex math and physics problems they encounter in their first year of college by using the “plug and chug” method they employed in high school, they also fail. Earlier Solutions In our integrated program for first-year engineering students that combines engineering, calculus, physics, and English, the instructors endeavor to create syllabi in which course content overlaps. We try to ensure that concepts in the various classes are taught in a sequence that allows for reinforcement in the various subjects. As English teachers, when we first began our integ