Bang Head Here: First Year Instructors Dealing With Student Failure

As first-year Instructors in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, we are highly motivated, extremely dedicated, and welltrained teachers. Fresh from graduate school and the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Department’s famous 6-week Instructor Summer Workshop, we were excited as our first semester started. We were eager to get into the classroom and lead our gifted students to academic victory. Our students, cadets who competed rigorously to come to our institution, are some of the brightest college students in the country. They have chosen engineering as their major and future profession. However, once the semester was underway we found that despite our training, motivation and effort, we still had students fail and perform poorly on exams. Why do dedicated, disciplined, and driven students who want to be engineers fail? Is our instruction not meeting these particular students’ learning needs? Are the lessons built with proper attention to building student learning through the cognitive domain? Is it a lack of motivation caused by outside influences? Is it a result of another academic failure or tragedy that creates a cycle of poor performance? Are their study habits poor? Or, could it be that these students simply do not understand the material? This paper investigates the possible sources of failure of cadets enrolled in two introductory Civil Engineering courses that are taught by new instructors.