Assessing First-Year Programs: Outcomes, Methods, and Findings

First-year programs reflect a wide array of approaches, from general engineering programs to discipline-specific introductions to the major spanning one or two semesters; many of these programs have published descriptions of their approaches to assessment and the effects of various intervention strategies on student retention or specialized outcomes. Yet much of this work remains localized; little research to date has examined assessment across multiple programs to identify large-scale trends, locate similarities and differences in targeted learning outcomes, analyze methods of assessment, and identify best practices. As engineering education focuses on continuous curricular enhancement to best address the needs of 21-century engineers, however, the community has a strong need to develop and share robust methods of assessing a variety of outcomes at the first-year level. This paper begins to address this need by providing a preliminary review of existing approaches discussed in the literature in recent years.