Characteristics of Successful Student-Faculty Interaction Outside the Classroom

Student-faculty interaction, including contact outside the classroom, is one of the most important factors in undergraduate student motivation and performance. In engineering, both students and faculty have limited time due to rigorous curricula and research expectation, and so may not prioritize contact outside the classroom. However, particularly in multidisciplinary courses, this contact may be critical to help students with various backgrounds learn the course material. Fusani, through an applied communication approach, studied the salient characteristics of outof-class student-faculty interaction. We build upon this framework by investigating the impact of student-faculty interaction outside the classroom in a variety of courses in a multidisciplinary engineering program. Our purpose is to identify qualities of successful student-faculty interaction to help both students and faculty optimize their contact outside the classroom. Our study focused on three courses within the general engineering curriculum: Statics, Physics III, and Signals and Systems. Total enrollment in these courses is about 50 students, with each course spanning various engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, computer). We kept a detailed log of student-faculty interaction outside the classroom, including the frequency and duration of each contact. We also classified the nature of each interaction according to certain distinguishing characteristics, such as whether the students visited individually or in a group, whether the student sat down or stood at the door, whether there was any work done on the board, and whether the interaction took place within schedule office hours. We then examined the relationship between these characteristics and the students’ performance in the class, as measured by their grade. Students engaging in more than 10 visits during the 15-week semester had significantly higher grades than students engaging in 5-10 visits (p=0.011) or less than 5 visits (p<0.001). Of the top students (grades more than 0.5 standard deviations above the mean), 80% interacted with faculty outside the classroom more than once, with 37% interacting more than five times. This interaction was characterized by an average frequency of 7.6 visits (about 1 visit every 2 weeks), an average length of 10 minutes, an average total time of 80 minutes during the semester, about 6 emails during the semester, with written work about 30% of the time, group visits 40% of the time, with visits occurring an average of 1.3 days before an assignment is due, and outside scheduled office hours 70% of the time. For the struggling students (grades more than 0.5 standard deviations below the mean), only 14% interacted with faculty outside the classroom more than five times. The factor that best correlated with students’ performance was frequency of contact, followed by total interaction time. Factors not correlated with student performance were average length of visit, number of emails, and number of days before the assignment due date. With respect to discipline, the undecided students were less likely to have contact. With respect to gender, female students appeared to have a greater increase in grade with more interaction. With respect to year, the youngest students (sophomores) were the least likely to visit, with more than 50% having only one or fewer visits outside the classroom. These results can help tailor student-faculty interaction outside of class. P ge 22320.2 Introduction Student-faculty interaction, including contact outside the classroom, is one of the most important factors in undergraduate student motivation and performance. In engineering, both students and faculty have limited time due to rigorous curricula and research expectation, and so may not prioritize contact outside the classroom. However, particularly in multidisciplinary courses, this contact may be critical to help students with various backgrounds learn the course material. Multidisciplinary courses have become increasingly popular in recent years. As engineering programs around the world seek to address changing global issues in the 21st century, there has been a marked growth of interdisciplinary fields such as bioengineering, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. Tied to this growth, the engineering landscape has highlighted the need to develop professionals who possess an interdisciplinary skill set and work effectively in multidisciplinary teams. ABET directly emphasizes this need in one of their main program outcome criteria: 3d) an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams. However, in effectively designing and teaching multidisciplinary courses, faculty are met with various intrinsic challenges, such as the need to account for the differences in the technical background of the students. Student-faculty interaction outside the classroom may play a particularly important role in effectively meeting these challenges in multidisciplinary courses. To this end, we build upon an applied communications framework developed by Fusani to investigate the impact of student-faculty interaction outside the classroom in a variety of courses in a multidisciplinary engineering program. Our purpose is to identify qualities of successful student-faculty interaction to help both students and faculty optimize their contact outside the classroom. Methods Our study focused on three courses within the ABET-accredited general engineering curriculum at a small (less than 2,000) regional liberal arts college. The courses were: Statics, Signals and Systems, and Physics III (introductory waves, optics, fluids, and thermodynamics). These courses are required of all engineering majors and span various engineering disciplines and years. Each course had between 22 and 33 students, with a total enrollment in all courses of 48 distinct students (some students were enrolled in more than one course). Of the 48 total students, there were 37 men and 11 women, with 21 sophomores, 19 juniors, and 8 seniors. For declared concentrations in a specific discipline, there were 25 mechanical engineering, 6 computer engineering, 4 electrical engineering, 3 applied physics, and 10 undecided. For analysis purposes, the students were classified as either mechanical, computer and electrical, other, or undecided. The three courses included three lectures (each meeting two or three times per week) and two lab sections (for the Physics III course). They were taught by two assistant professors that offered 8 and 4 scheduled office hours each week, respectively, in addition to an open door policy. Page 22320.3 Throughout the semester, we kept a detailed log of student-faculty interaction outside the classroom by filling in a questionnaire after the student exited. The information included: • the student’s identifier • the date • the time • the approximate length of the visit (2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 60 minutes) • individual or group • seated or standing • written work (on a white board or blank piece of paper) or none At the end of the semester we also recorded the number of emails exchanged with the student, as well as any significant time spent with the student doing other activities, such as student clubs, department events, advising, additional projects or research, or sports. The college’s Institutional Review Board approved all data collection and protocols for protecting student’s identities. All students gave their informed consent to participate in the study. First we examined the characteristics of all the student-faculty interaction, and compared the interaction characteristics for the top students (grades more than 0.5 standard deviations above the mean) to those of the struggling students (grades more than 0.5 standard deviations below the mean). Then we examined the relationship between these characteristics and the students’ performance in the class, as measured by their grade relative to the course average. We looked at the strength of the effect of: frequency, length of visit, total visit time, the number of days before an assignment was due, and the number of emails. We then determined if these effects differed depending on year, discipline, or gender of the student. We also compared the results for the first third of the semester to the entire semester to determine if the beginning of the semester is a particularly critical time to establish interaction. Results Average characteristics of student-faculty interaction for the entire cohort over the semester included: interaction 5.5 times (about once every three weeks), lasting for 10 minutes, total interaction time of about 61 minutes, 4.5 emails sent, written work 30% of the time, group visits 30% of the time, outside of office hours 70% of the time, and 1.35 days before an assignment was due. Statistical details including standard deviations, maxima, and minima are included in Table 1. The factor that best correlated with students’ performance was the frequency of contact (number of visits during the semester), followed by the total interaction time (Figure 1). Factors not correlated with student performance were the length of the visit, the number of emails sent by the student, and the number of days before the assignment was due.