2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A first-year seminar required for students at the University at Buffalo aims to provide students with the necessary tools for academic success and a suitable introduction to their field of interest. Therefore, the first-year engineering seminar aims to provide students with an introduction to engineering thinking and engineering design. The depth and rigor of the seminar were considered a barrier to those that might have been interested but not committed yet to an engineering path. In the late 2000’s it was deemed appropriate to provide students that were exploring the possibility of pursuing an engineering degree with a specific type of first-year engineering seminar with a comparable but different depth and rigor. The two different seminars were deemed for (a) accepted and (b) intended students.
In its first editions, the number of students in the intended group was small. However, the size of this group increased throughout the years, and it became evident that it was a more diverse group in terms of race/ethnicity and first-generation status than that of the accepted students. In addition, the proportion of students that applied to be in the engineering major but were not accepted that were in the intended group increased. This resulted on a deficiency perception that intended students had to manage. In summary, what was planned to expand the participation of those that were considering engineering only as an option ended up being perceived as an unfair differentiation determined significantly by inequities in the educational pipeline.
With the goal to advance the equity goals of the school, a policy change in 2022 was made to integrate the two groups of students in the same cohort of first-year engineering students. Getting rid of the accepted/intended dichotomy led to instructional challenges as both versions of the course had to come to a revamped version that would serve both groups of students equitably. In Spring 2022, a committee started to work on revamping towards the first edition of this new course version that was launched in Fall 2022. The team included diverse faculty in terms of their backgrounds and experiences. This paper will report on the experience of implementing Backwards Design to redesign a 3-credit first-year seminar for engineering students with the goal of providing equitable training of first-year engineering students joining SEAS for years to come. We present the rationale supporting the selection of enduring outcomes and learning objectives and report on the challenges of building them cooperatively within a diverse team of educators. Finally, we offer our reflections on the growth the team members experienced as educators and co-designers of educational experiences during this exercise.