2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Re-imagined First-Year Engineering Program—FYE2.0

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

Purdue University established Freshman Engineering (now known as First-Year Engineering) in 1953, the first program in the U.S. to do so. Over the years, First-Year Engineering (FYE) programs have been established at several institutions, but not all, across the country. In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided funding for what were called the Engineering Education Coalitions. They funded a total of eight coalitions that involved more than 40 institutions of higher education over the period from 1990-2005. In addition, NSF created the Action Agenda program in the late 1990s aimed at individual institutions that wanted to adapt and adopt the findings from the existing Coalitions. A strong focus of the Coalitions was on introductory engineering courses, with the rationale that engineering was losing too many students through attrition, and we needed to pay more attention to the formative years. Nearly every Coalition created some version of an FYE program through this funding mechanism. The number of FYE programs across the nation has increased dramatically based on these investments, largely in response to curricular efforts aimed at retaining engineering students by providing them with meaningful career-oriented experiences early in their college educations.

Many of these first-year programs were called “common first-year engineering programs,” meaning that all students enrolled in the same courses at the same time. It is a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to education. Despite the laudable goals espoused by most FYE programs, there has been an unintended consequence: curricular rigidity and inflexibility. Thus, students have little agency to shape their own pathway toward an engineering degree. Recently, a midwestern R1 institution obtained a grant from the NSF to develop the next generation of first-year programs: FYE2.0. The program we envision will provide students with essential skills, while at the same time providing them with opportunities for customization and flexibility in charting their own engineering journey. This paper outlines the logistical progress made in implementing FYE2.0 to date and discusses plans for the future.

Authors

Dr. Sheryl A. Sorby University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. Sheryl Sorby is currently a Professor of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati and was a former Fulbright Scholar at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Dublin, Ireland. She is a professor emerita of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics from Michigan Tech.
Dr. Muhammad Asghar P.E. http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-2811-9172 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Muhammad Asghar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering and Computer Education at University of Cincinnati (UC). Before coming to UC, he earned a Ph.D. in Engineering Education, a master's degree in clinical psychology, a master's degree in educational psychology, and a bachelor's degree in computer information systems engineering. Muhammad’s research interests currently focus on students' mental health and well-being in engineering education. He is actively involved in research related to the use of Physiology Measurement Instruments to understand the behavior of engineering undergraduates.
Dr. Gregory Warren Bucks http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0986-7941 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Gregory Bucks joined the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati in 2012. He received his BSEE from the Pennsylvania State University in 2004, his MSECE from Purdue University in 2006, and his PhD in Engineering Education in 2010, also from Purdue University. His research interests lie in first-year pedagogy and program assessment as well as conceptual understanding of fundamental computing concepts.
Jeremy Michael Olivar Hill http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7106-0524 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Program Manager, Undergraduate Programs, Dept of Engineering & Computing Education
Dr. Jeff Kastner University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. Jeff Kastner is an Assistant Professor Educator in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati. His primary responsibility is to teach freshmen engineering classes which focus on hands-on experiments, basic computer progra
Prof. Teri J Murphy http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0995-2529 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. Murphy is a professor in the Department of Engineering & Computing Education at the University of Cincinnati.
Dr. David Reeping http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0803-7532 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. David Reeping is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering and Computing Education at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He received his B.S. in Engineering Education with a Mathematics minor from Ohio Northern University. His main research interests include transfer student information asymmetries, threshold concepts, curricular complexity, and advancing quantitative and fully integrated mixed methods.

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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