2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As a civil engineering professor at the University of Hartford - a northeastern private teaching-focused university, the first author has been exploring effective strategies to enhance students’ sense of belonging, teamwork spirit, and class engagement over the past two years, focusing on a first-year engineering design class, a first-year introduction to construction management class, and a junior-level structural analysis class. Two major categories of interventions implemented in these three classes in Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 semesters include classroom icebreakers and varied assessment formats.
The classroom icebreakers included fun team-building activities and “Fast Friend” conversations. Before Fall 2025, assessments in structural analysis class consisted of regular homework and exams; in Fall 2025, it shifted to a combination of partially graded homework, open-book in-class quizzes with open discussion, and exams.
For all three classes, anonymous pre- and post-surveys assessing students’ sense of belonging, teamwork, and self-efficacy were administered at mid-semester and the end of the semester. In addition, direct assessment data for the structural class - including midterm and final exams potentially influenced by the interventions - were compared between the intervention semester (Fall 2025) and prior non-intervention semesters (Fall 2024 and Fall 2023). Statistical t-tests were utilized to analyze survey responses and performance data.
Preliminary results indicate two key findings: classroom icebreakers are more effective for lower-level students than higher-level students; and frequent formative assessment, such as in-class quizzes, improved mastery of material and, when conducted in groups with open discussion, fostered teamwork, peer learning, and reduced test anxiety. Future work will further examine whether open-discussion in-class quizzes improve student performance even on closed-book, closed-note exams where discussion is not permitted.