Work in Progress: The Construction of a New First-Year Engineering Program

and Background This paper describes the first steps in building, observing, and evaluating a new first-year engineering (FYE) program at a flagship R1 university. We start from the beginning, with a brief history of the program, and move into the construction of it as it exists today. We feel there are two items in particular that are of significant interest to the greater community. First there are unique problems that arise when the program is constructed (and expanded into satellite campuses). How to address these issues is of fundamental importance to any emergent FYE program. Also, the nature of flexibility among instructors is a topic frequently ignored by FYE programs and not significantly addressed in the literature – a topic among our program colloquially referred to as “going rogue.” Within our program, we allow significant deviation to incorporate individual teaching styles while still requiring a core set of exercises to be accomplished by every course section. Starting in 2013, the Dean and Associate Dean for Academics in the College of Engineering visited established FYE programs and began planning implementation of a program suited to our own college. Improving student retention was the primary goal and the secondary goal was to reduce changes of major within the college to help students choose an appropriate major and pursue it to graduation. This phenomenon is not endemic to our program and has been documented by others (Froyd & Ohland, 2005) Initial discussions with a working group explored what course changes would be necessary to develop an introductory curriculum acceptable to all nine degree programs. In 2015, a director was appointed from within the college with 50% effort assigned to administering the program. With the help of department representatives, a three-course sequence was envisioned to replace the discipline specific “101” courses, either of two computer programming courses and the general education requirement for Inquiry into Arts & Creativity. All students must be in pre-calculus or beyond to be admitted to the college. The balance of credit hours and course enrollments over the first two semesters requires that some students take chemistry first and others take physics first with or without the labs. The course outlines were approved and all of the degree program curricula were changed in one combined proposal. Facets and Decisions Made Information sessions Each student is required to attend four FYE Information Session (FYE-IS) throughout the course. Every FYE-IS session is offered in the evening, nearly every weekday, for a period of four weeks in the first semester for two rounds. All nine majors at the College sent full professors (and in some cases multiple full professors, graduate students, and undergraduates) to speak to the students about the unique facets of each department, along with undergraduate opportunities, student groups based within the department, and more. Parity of team members While the teaching team consists of multiple teaching faculty, special title series faculty (STS) on the tenure-track, and tenured full professors (including one associate dean), each member of the team is considered equal to others, and contributes to the curriculum of the courses taught. All are referred to as professors in and out of class by students. Construction of the Learning Objectives While the team could not find modern research on the subject, anecdotal evidence from interviews with other FYE teams indicates that many schools have outcomes without objectives – the two being radically different constructs. In the appendices, we have included some of our learning objectives. Perhaps most ubiquitous from our conversations with other programs is the nature of how to provide students with opportunities to explore other majors (guided or directed choice) while still helping them feel grounded in their own tentative choice. From informal conversations, it is clear that our students have a perception of engineering that may not necessarily be real – and certainly that difficulty is key (Stevens, 2007). Part of the goal of learning objectives within our program is to make them available to students and reiterate them throughout the course sequences in order to demonstrate that difficulty is not the endgame, nor is it productive to think in that fashion. Use of Reflective and Liberative Pedagogies Both the first and third introductory course make significant use of reflective responses and self-actualizing modalities (Hirsch & McKenna, 2008; Riley, 2003). Students throughout the first and third courses are asked to reflect upon various exercises and asked to contribute to the exercises through feedback. In one example, students were asked to give general rules of thumb for a machine floor optimization problem. Due to some unique and unexpected directions the students took, a reflection assignment was designed, and the proposed exam questions for the module changed based on student engagement and proclivity with various facets of the assignment. Another example of liberative philosophies comes to us from a few of our faculty who invite students to critique and analyze the course syllabi the first day while sitting in a circle. The conversations reported by the faculty indicate that students begin sharing information they did not know would help them in their engineering careers. The third course in the sequence being more of a team design course, employs methods from other design courses from FYE institutions in contact with our team (Adams, 2002; Atman et al., 2007; Crismond & Adams, 2012; Turns et al., 2006). One engagement protocol that mixes best practices from Adams’ work and is similar to the liberative ones employed by Riley is used by one faculty member who requires all students to stand while discussing an element of design from the project, and the next speaker must amplify the previous student’s statement in terms of his own. Students in this scenario must engage in synthetic and reflective thinking each time they want to contribute to a design conversation. Use of Materials from Major Courses One of the most important aspects of this course sequence in FYE is to help students get a glimpse of “real” engineering. In this case, this means providing them opportunities to reflect upon their major using tools developed by individual majors. The third course in the sequence employs elements from directly from chemical, biomedical, mechanical, mining, civil, electrical, and computer science. Another reason this is employed is because all students matriculate under a major designation, thus relieving them of the anxiety of being undecided or having to make a first choice during the school year (Brown & Strange, 1981; Titley & Titley, 1980). Another more subversive element lies in the fact that although capstone courses are ubiquitous and many agree helpful for engineering students, the link between first and senior year experiences is not as well understood by the engineering education community (Howe, 2010). Some of the materials we use in the FYE program are ones that have been discussed with and developed with faculty from the second year courses at our institution. The goal being to give them a glimpse of items they will reiterate within a year that individual majors believe will be important for junior and senior year studies. Lastly, providing these useful skills in a comfortable learning environment attenuates the feeling that the first year course sequence is a gatekeeper or barrier. Students are highly aware of such courses and when they perceive they’re being “weeded out,” their behavior changes (Suresh, 2007). Administrative Concerns Administrative issues are handled by one centralized director, with autonomy to direct team members to tasks as needed. The lack of an assistant director is intentional and protects tenure-track faculty members from over commitment to administrative responsibilities beyond routine committee work. The director positive answers to the assistant dean in the college of engineering, as the courses themselves are housed under the dean’s office, and not any one college. Housing within departments Every team member has a home within the relevant department. All team members have voting privileges at their department meetings. All tenure-track members have offices within their departments (and research space where necessary). This sets up a structure where each team member is engaged in conversations and privy to departmental opinions about the FYE program. In departmental meetings and retreats where questions are asked about perceptions about the FYE program, FYE team members must recuse themselves, but are not limited or censured from speaking to fellow faculty members otherwise. Methodology and Incoming Data The majority of work thus far has encompassed student course responses, primary survey analysis, and preliminary results from focus groups. The focus group interviews followed a semistructured protocol revolving around questions of: general understanding of the program and the reason for its establishment; potential benefits of the program for the university and the college; concerns about the shift in curriculum model; and views of what constitutes success or failure of such a program. The general methodology for our qualitative interview process follows that outlined in by Strauss (Strauss, 1987). An external evaluation center performed the interviews and small focus groups to avoid ethical conflicts. Ethnographic data has consisted of informal notes and journals kept by members of the FYE team. The goal of such an informal structure is to preserve natural observations (Anderson, 2003). Since the first year of the course has not been completed, and we have not had an external evaluator to give an independent view of the notes (along with a coding schema), they will not be ready for presentation until the summer. 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