2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

First-year engineering experiences are crucial in influencing student persistence, identity development, and career paths. However, introductory engineering courses could be either too broad to foster a disciplinary identity or too narrow to accommodate diverse engineering students. This Work-in-Progress (WIP) paper presents early findings from the redesign of a first-year engineering course led by civil engineering faculty and serving both civil and mechanical engineering students.
The course is structured around an interdisciplinary, project-based framework emphasizing transferable competencies in engineering design, teamwork, and technical communication. Three signature projects, the Site Visit Project, the K’NEX Bridge Design Project, and the Engineering Design Challenge, anchor the curriculum. Beginning in Fall 2024, targeted revisions were implemented to strengthen disciplinary inclusivity. Rather than creating discipline-specific tracks, the intervention embedded mechanically grounded analysis within shared design challenges and diversified site visits to include more mechanically intensive contexts. Faculty instructional framing was intentionally revised while maintaining consistent assessment rubrics.
Using nationally normed IDEA survey results, DFW rates, mean GPA trends, and major-disaggregated grade analyses from Fall 2021 through Fall 2025 (N = 542), this study examines longitudinal performance patterns before and after interdisciplinary revisions. Results indicate declining DFW rates for both majors, with proportionally larger reductions among mechanical engineering students, who had previously exhibited higher risk. Mean GPA trends show convergence between mechanical and civil engineering students by Fall 2025, suggesting improvements distributed across performance levels. IDEA survey results consistently reflect strong student perceptions of teamwork, applied learning, and professional skill development.
Although causation cannot be established, the temporal alignment between integrative instructional revisions and narrowing performance gaps suggests that expanded interdisciplinary representation may enhance alignment between course design and the needs of a multi-major student population. These findings contribute to emerging conversations about how faculty disciplinary background and intentional instructional framing influence inclusive learning environments in introductory engineering education.