2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation:

This Complete Evidence-Based Practice Paper focuses on the topic of Curriculum. Specifically, it discusses the efforts at a large, midwestern, urban university to update their first-year engineering curriculum by providing students and programs more freedom to select content that will both better prepare students for their upper-division classes and specifically allow the students to pursue topics that are of interests to them. The desire to embark on this re-envisioning of the first-year curriculum is motivated by a variety of reasons. First, current engineering curricula have changed very little in the past 50 years and have the goal of producing students with the exact same capabilities. However, both the demands of industry and the current generation of students requires a more flexible approach to allow students to better engage with the field of engineering and to allow curricula to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of engineering practice and technology. Additionally, the university has set a goal to increase enrollment in engineering by 50% over the next 6 years. To accomplish this goal, since the entirety of this growth cannot be accomplished simply by adding new first-year students, the Dean of the college has made it a goal of increasing first-year to second-year retention by 10%.

Background:

At the large, midwestern, urban university, the first-year curriculum went through a major redesign in 2018 with a redistribution of credit hours and a change in focus to be more design-centric. While the intentions behind this change were good, the resulting implementation has resulted in a significant amount of stress for both students and faculty. During the 2023-24 academic year, data was collected to understand the impact of the current course structure on students’ mental health and engineering identity, which showed that students, and particularly those underrepresented within the college, were experiencing a significant amount of stress that was negatively impacting their sense of belonging within engineering. As a result, the faculty in the Department of XX pursued (and were awarded) an NSF grant to redesign the first-year curriculum by utilizing a modular approach. This approach will break up the current six credits of first-year engineering content into two, 1-credit design project courses (one taken each in the fall and spring semesters) and a selection of eight, 0.5-credit modules. These modules will be designed to introduce students to a variety of engineering skills and topics including computing, CAD and ethics, to name a few. This approach will allow students to select modules that are of interest to them, allow programs to select modules that better prepare their students for their upper-division classes, and allow for the curriculum to easily adapt to new topics and technologies as the landscape of engineering practice continues to evolve by introducing or updating individual modules.

Methods/Assessment:

This paper will lay out the three-year plan of taking the traditional first-year engineering course sequence currently in place and converting it into modules. Particular emphasis will be given to the groundwork being laid during this first year of the project, which has involved getting buy-in from the University, College, and Faculty within our department, generating an initial set of 0.5 to 1.0 credit hour classes, and working with the registrar, advising, and other stakeholders to develop the infrastructure needed within the college and university to allow for the final implementation.

During this first year of the NSF project, a limited number of modules will be reviewed, evaluated, and then deployed to students and assessed through student feedback, faculty feedback, and first to second semester retention numbers.

Results:

This paper will discuss the feedback we have received from stakeholders during the first year of this NSF project, such as advising’s concern with the ability to schedule all the modules within the provided classroom space and within the university’s scheduling structure. Initial feedback on the modules deployed during the first year will also be shared, along with the roadmap for both implementation and assessment moving forward.