Preparation and In-Class Intervention Programs for Barrier Courses for Two-year College Engineering Students

Students enrolled in community college engineering programs in California typically have a long path of prerequisites to overcome before they are able to enroll in transfer-level engineering courses due to under preparation when entering college. The courses required for the engineering path involve many courses with high drop, withdraw, and fail rates, which can lengthen the time needed to complete transfer coursework. At Cañada College we found that even students that ultimately persisted were attempting courses such as trigonometry and physics multiple times before they were able to successfully pass the courses. These challenges inhibit the students’ ability to complete the necessary requirements for transfer in a timely manner, if they are able to complete them at all. We have chosen to address these issues by developing two methods of academic support. The first is to prepare students prior to the start of the semester, and the second is to offer continued support for the duration of the semester. Pre-semester preparation is offered through one of the free Jam programs available to all campus students. A specific example is Physics Jam, which is a pre-semester self-paced boot-camp program to introduce and review the necessary math requirements for the physics class in which they are enrolled. This math review is also coupled with intense study-skills workshops to teach students how to approach their upcoming course. This program allows students some extra time with the introductory material for their upcoming courses as well as the necessary reading and problem-solving skills that they will need to be successful in their course. In addition to the Jams, continued academic support is offered once students are enrolled in the course. In-class academic support is offered in the form of a novel, modified Supplemental Instruction program that is called Embedded Peer Instruction Cohort, or EPIC for short. It has been shown that for STEM fields student success is higher when they work together as groups outside of class as opposed to studying alone. The EPIC program focuses on having student leaders go over examples in pre-scheduled weekly study groups and encourage students to work on these problems together. The aim is to encourage students to develop the confidence to tackle difficult problems and the skills and the knowledge to work together to obtain a solution. This program is separate from tutoring and focuses on how to approach and work through problems as opposed to one-on-one topic remediation. Students that participate regularly in EPIC program perform better than their colleagues who do not participate in the program. This paper will discuss the successes, obstacles, and best practices in developing and implementing academic support programs for two-year college engineering students.