2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work in Progress paper describes early development of an innovative learning community program to welcome and support new precalculus-level students into their engineering academic pathway. The project features cross-disciplinary collaboration of engineering, math, physics, English, and history faculty working together toward design, implementation, and assessment of a two-quarter long first-year experience learning community program consisting of six different courses. The place-based curriculum will include contextualized precalculus and English composition, regional Pacific Northwest history, orientation to the engineering profession, and introductory skills such as problem-solving, computer programming, and team-based design. The course sequence will also include community-engaged project-based learning in the first quarter and a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in the second quarter, both with an overarching theme of energy and water resources. The approach leverages multiple high-impact educational practices to promote deep conceptual learning, motivate foundational skill development, explore social relevance and connection, and ultimately seeks to strengthen students’ engineering identity, sense of belonging, and general academic preparation for success in an engineering major.

Curriculum development work to date has followed a collaborative Backward Design approach as articulated by Wiggins and McTighe (2005). The faculty team worked together to craft Essential Questions and Understandings with which they will seek to engage students through multiple touchpoints, activities, projects, and perspectives throughout the two-quarter experience. Some example Essential Questions include: What is the work of engineering? Who decides what problems engineers work on? And how does the engineered world affect how we live? In exploring these questions and others, the instructional design aims to promote Understandings in students such as: theoretical knowledge gives engineers the breadth and depth to work in a variety of workplaces and leverage a wide array of skills for creative problem solving; the most innovative engineering work leverages a diversity of skills, knowledge, experiences, and perspectives in a multidisciplinary team; and engineers have shaped land and resource use in the Pacific Northwest, and conversely their designs have been shaped by their perceptions of the landscape and environmental policies. The team mapped existing outcomes of the constituent courses to these program-level learning goals as an exercise to explore how the courses will fit together and synthesize a coherent and connected learning experience.

We plan to pilot the learning community for four years and compare a variety of student outcomes measures with those of a demographically matched sample of students progressing through the engineering program under the traditional a la carte model. We will also measure changes in socioemotional measures such as sense of belonging and identity with a mixed methods approach combining surveys, coding of reflective writing assignments, and focus groups. This WIP paper presents the program-level development work introduced above as well as the envisioned methodologies for evaluating the impact on student success.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding By Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.