An Update: The Engagement and Retention of Electrical Engineering Students with a First Semester Freshman Experience Course

Freshman retention has been a critical issue for engineering programs over the last decade. Universities have implemented many different approaches to improve freshman retention including: creating general freshman courses to give early hands-on experience to the students, utilizing student feedback to design courses, and moving the ownership and maintenance of laboratory equipment from the university to the students. In the fall semester of 2009, the Electrical Engineering program at The University of Texas at Tyler took the initiative of creating and offering a first semester freshman experience course aimed at improving freshman retention. The rationale for creating this course was based on student and faculty feedback, and comments provided by graduating seniors during their senior exit interview. A number of students also expressed their concern about how late the electrical engineering laboratory experience is in the curriculum. Since then significant changes have been made to this course in order to make it more enjoyable and effective in retaining students. Some of these changes include the establishment of a departmental template used to prepare the materials that are distributed to the students, the inclusion of virtual instruments such as the NI myDAQ and Labview, and the replacement of PSpice with NI Multisim and Ultiboard. The last two software utilities have made the fabrication of PCBs easier for the students and faculty. Furthermore, the students are required to use the NI myDAQ in some of their laboratories and in the final project which some of them also include the use of Labview. This paper will present the data collected as a part of the course offering over four academic years, specifically split into two analysis categories. The first part of the data analysis will focus on the effect of the course on student retention, extracted from the freshman cohorts. The second part of the data analysis will focus on student surveys performed at the end of the semester. This survey was designed to measure vital components of overall course effectiveness with finer granularity, including students understanding of topics such as the role of electrical engineers and their impact on society. Finally, the first cohort of students that took this course are graduating this year, by analyzing the numbers it can be seen that the retention rates have been increased from 54.8% in 2008 to 80%.