2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This evidence-based practice paper aims to gauge the success of implementing instructional changes to a first-year engineering seminar in the retention and sense of belonging of students. Engineering courses are often labeled as weed out courses, which have a significant impact on underrepresented student communities such as LGBTQIA+ students, women, students of color, and students with disabilities (Wallwey et al., 2022). Engineering courses often force students into the ideology that they are not good enough when faced with challenges, causing low retention rates; with underrepresented students often experiencing little to no recognition and feel that they need to put in additional hours of work to keep up (Robert & Leydens, 2023). In addition, research has shown that students often feel they are not prepared enough for more advanced course work in their major increasing their chances of dropping out of engineering (McCoy et al., 2017).
This first-year engineering course is a seminar that all engineering students take upon admission. The intent of this course is to maintain engineering retention at this large university and to encourage a sense of belonging to the course work. While retention outcomes have been analyzed at the institutional level, no formal assessment of sense of belonging have been implemented for the course. The redesign of the course was executed through the use of Backwards Design and the Content, Assessment, and Pedagogy (CAP) model to consolidate previously separated tracks of the course deemed as accepted and intended. After merging the two versions of the course, other key changes included the addition of enduring outcomes and learning objectives aligned with student success and engineering identity and related assessments. By harnessing the effect of enduring understandings and learning outcomes, our team aims to provide better support to students in class. It is also envisioned that this re-design will support students understanding of the development of their own engineering skills. Additionally, Professional Identity Development theory encourages students to value diversity using a similar outcome framework. The outcomes drive what the end goal of student understanding comes to be, in this case, self-reflection and ability to work on a diverse team of students.
This study will be evaluating the success of the course re-design. Our research team developed a survey to identify student self-recognition, identification of engineering skills, and sense of belonging in the engineering community. The primary goal of this research is to identify whether the changes made to the course increased students’ (a) sense of belonging to the engineering community, (b) assisted in identifying engineering skills, and (c) support their self-recognition as engineers. Through collection of survey data across three groups of students, those that took the course in 2021, 2022, and 2023, our team aims to assess the trend in our identified areas. The goal in surveying this population of students is to set a baseline for before the changes to this course were made. No changes were made in 2021, the course was combined in 2022 from two separate sections, and the new changes discussed above using the CAP model were made for the Fall 2023 Semester. Analyses will be conducted with descriptive and inferential statistics.
This survey will be deployed among students that are still enrolled in the engineering program at this university in the US East. Our research team anticipates that with the changes enacted to this course there will be an increase in student self-recognition, an increase in the students’ ability to identify their own engineering skills, and an increase in the students’ sense of belonging in the engineering community. Such potential results would have positive implications for potential replication in other first-year engineering education programming.