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2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Evaluating the impact of an introductory first-year engineering design course in shaping students’ experience and academic preparedness

This Work-in-Progress paper assesses the impact of a cross-disciplinary first year engineering design course on student retention. Engineering programs suffer from extraordinarily high attrition rates, where approximately half of students change their major to a non-engineering one before graduation. While many factors underlie one’s choice to change majors, it is possible that first-year engineering students enter their degree studies with no knowledge of the engineering disciplines and professional paths they offer, and find that their selected major is misaligned with their interests and values. Introductory engineering courses, which are commonly taken during the first semester of the engineering degree, represent an opportunity to acquaint first-year students with different engineering disciplines. Although these courses typically aim to introduce students to a single engineering discipline and excite them about it, they could be expanded to first-year students across engineering majors and teach them about the different engineering disciplines in one classroom. Such cross-disciplinary introductory courses have the potential to inform students about their choice of major, encourage switching majors within engineering, and reduce drop-out rates to non-engineering majors overall. Herein, we design a study that aims to answer whether cross-disciplinary introductory engineering courses better prepare students for their academic journey than discipline-specific courses, and promote student retention in engineering. The study compares two introductory engineering design courses that are offered in our institution, one catering to students from a single engineering discipline (mechanical engineering) and another that is cross-disciplinary. Surveys are developed to quantify students’ comprehension of their selected major, their attitudes toward it, and whether they contemplate switching majors within or outside of engineering. The surveys will be administered in three phases of students’ first year: before taking the introductory course, at the end of it, and at the end of their subsequent semester. In addition to surveys, students’ grades and rates of attrition within and outside of engineering will be recorded. The data will be analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models and through a causal inference framework. The study will be validated and launched by the authors at their institution in the next academic cycle. Through this WIP paper, the authors seek to collect constructive feedback, and potentially expand this study beyond their institution.

Authors
  1. Roni Barak Ventura Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8186-3710 New Jersey Institute of Technology
  2. Prof. Lucie Tchouassi New Jersey Institute of Technology [biography]
  3. Dr. Jaskirat Sodhi New Jersey Institute of Technology [biography]
  4. Mr. Yusuf Ozkan New Jersey Institute of Technology [biography]
Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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