Strategies for Promoting Faculty Engagement with Early STEM Students

Michigan State UniversityCollege of EngineeringCenter for Engineering Education Research (CEER)

NSF DUE STEP Grantees Meeting 2012

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award 0757020 (DUE). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Workshop Objectives

• Participants will discuss plans and strategies to develop student-faculty interactions and enhance student engagement in their institutions.

Workshop Structure• Work group discussions to:

• Understand faculty interactions with [STEM] students.• Identify strategies to encourage sufficient and enthusiastic

faculty involvement.• Summary reporting from groups• Summary provided to all participants after workshop.

Who Are We?

Claudia Vergara, MSUColleen McDonough, MSUDaina Briedis, MSUJon Sticklen, MSUTom Wolff, MSUMark Urban-Lurain, MSURenée DeGraaf, LCCRuth Heckman, LCCNat Ehrlich (external evaluator)

Who are you?• Introductions

• Name, institution

• Show of hands• STEP project (# students)• Disciplinary focus

Engaging Early Engineering Students (EEES) to Expand Numbers of Degree Recipients

• Michigan State University (MSU) & Lansing Community College (LCC)

• Our goal is to raise the matriculation-to-graduation rate in the College of Engineering by ten percentage points.

USUK

CanadaIrelandRussia

GermanyFranceJapan

FinlandTaiwan

South KoreaChina

Singapore

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 454.5

6.27

9.810.1

12.813.8

17.320.9

21.925.4

33.339.1

Rank of percent of undergraduates receiving engineering degrees

Percent undergraduatesNSF S&E Indicators (2006)

Issues of Persistence & Retention

• Why students leave STEM (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997, Marra et al., 2012)

• Poor teaching & advising

• Difficult curricula

• Lack of belonging

• Barrier courses

Most students who leave STEM do so between the 1st and 2nd year.

• Early engineering programs are a key factor in retention and graduation of undergraduate engineering students.

Student pre-college

traits

First-year outcomes, 2nd-

year inputs

Institutional Context

Adapted from Pascarella &Terenzini, 1991

Contextual View of the Early STEM Experience

Classroom Experience:

Pedagogy Climate Faculty & Student Characteristics

Out-of-class Experiences

Residential activitiesWorkAdvisingTutoring

Social Interactions

Peers, sports, clubs, organizations,

“dating”

EnvironmentalFactors

Personal factors:

Self-identityChallengesStrategies

The EEES Structure• Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL)

program based on supplemental instruction (SI) model.

• Connector Faculty (CF) program to directly engage engineering faculty with early engineering students.

• Program to provide formative assessments (gateway exams) in key courses with follow-on tutorials.

• A program to develop and exploit course material from one key course to another thereby enabling a "program view" by our students instead of the more typical "course silo view ”.

Snapshot Summer 2007

2005 Entering freshmen who ‘declared’ engineering

We address two categories of student leavers:• Those who leave because

of academic difficulties.

• Those who leave because they find the educational environment of early engineering to be hostile and/or not engaging.

56 credits for admission

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1001.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5

Cum Credits

GPA

GPA for admission

Strategies• Articulate type of program (in response to a

challenge/problem)• Program that increases faculty engagement with early STEM students.

• Desired outcomes:• Create a CF team of faculty who “care about” the early engineering

students and provide encouraging contact, timely intervention, and career role modeling.

• Increase retention of academically qualified students.

• Understand context:• The institution.• The influences (students, faculty, administration, resources).

Context: Opportunity

Two freshmen courses:• EGR 100: Intro to Design • EGR 102: MATLAB-based problem solving

Context: Key Players

• Students• Students in Engineering Design (EGR 100)

• Faculty:• Become part of the CF team• NOT academic advisers• Provided resources

Program Approach: Students

• Interact with CF in formal and informal activities:• Approx. 8 students per faculty • Face-to-face meetings • Large-group activities• Sponsored events (field trips)

Program Approach: Faculty• Training/orientation sessions

• Guidance for intervention• Collaboration with academic advisers• Check-in communications• Troubleshooting meeting

The First Meeting in EGR 100

Addressing challenges: it’s a design process

~800 students180 faculty

10-12 students per faculty; informal groups; orientation session for faculty; some planned field trips; first-day meeting in EGR 100 classroom

Student no-shows;

groups too large

Encouragement for students (AND faculty) to answer e-mail; discontinue field trips; e-mail ‘engagement tips’ to faculty; orientation lowered faculty expectations & better guided informal discussion topics based on survey results

Difficulty recruiting enough faculty

Special recruitment in departmental faculty meetings, and via the chairs and the college dean

Feedback on orientation

session

Faculty orientation/training was conducted by engineering faculty and was data-driven based on results of prior year’s student and faculty survey results

~1000 students180 faculty

Increased faculty effort by advertising successes; changed to an “opt-in” program for students; early advertising in summer orientation and on move-in day

Difficulty getting

students to visit faculty

Link interactions with faculty to an EGR 100class assignment

What about students

who did not “opt in?”

Organized evening social activity, Engineering-Connect: faculty introduced students to their discipline in the context of a homework assignment based on 21st century engineering challenges

Faculty burn-out in re-

starting CF in spring

Carried fall CF assignments through spring semester; spring EGR 100 students still had Engineering Connect, although no CF program

Project Evaluation• Objectives:

• Determine progress toward project goals.• Document project activities, processes, and products.• Collect data to inform planning and improvement.

• Mixed methods approach:• Interviews, surveys , focus groups and existing institutional data.

Evaluation Results• The participation rate for students and faculty is 86% and

56% respectively.• CF-students were admitted to the COE at a higher rate

than non-CF.• CF-students expressed more positive attitudes about the

CF program and about the likelihood of being accepted into the COE.

• Student admission rate and attitude change are positively correlated with frequency of interaction with faculty.

• Non-CF students were almost twice as likely to think they would choose a different major.

First Group Activity• Identify a challenge you would like to address. Ex:

How would you connect faculty and students?

• List desired goals/outcomes.

• Describe the characteristics of your proposed program.

Second Group Activity• List environment/context aspects (internal and external)

that could influence your program. • Provide a brief rationale for why these are worth noting--

include the good, the bad and the ugly!

• Example:• External Influences:

• Market forces, accreditation agencies, disciplinary societies • Internal influences:

• Institutional: Mission, resources, governance• Department/unit: Key players, (faculty, students), discipline

Third Group Activity• Thinking about the bad and the ugly:

• Given the influences that you identified for your program, what methods, tools, or strategies might be most effective to address the challenges?

• Program Components (Approach)• Identify the core activities and how they align with

your goals/outcomes.• Discuss evaluation plans. What evidence do you need

to gather to assess your progress toward goals? (Think formative and summative).

References• Briedis, D., Ehrlich, N., McDonough, C., Sticklen, J. & Wolff, T. The EEES/Connector Faculty

Program: Surveys of Attitudes, Experience and Evaluations. In ASEE 2010. Paper 420 (2010).• Caffarella, R. S. (2002). Planning programs for adult learners: A practical guide for educators,

trainers, and staff developers (2nd Ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.• Marra, R. M., Rodgers, K. A., Shen, D. & Bogue, B. (2012). Leaving engineering: A multi-year

single institution study. Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Engineering Education. 101(1), 6-27.

• Micomonaco, J. P. & Sticklen, J. (2010). Toward a better understanding of academic and social integration: A qualitative study of factors related to persistence in engineering. Proceedings of the American Association of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, Louisville, KY.

• National Science Board. (2008). Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, Volume 1. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.nsf.gov/statistiscs/seind08/

• Pascarella, E., & Terenzini, P. (1991). How college affects students. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.• Seymour, Elaine and Nancy M. Hewitt (1997). Talking about leaving: Why undergraduates

leave the sciences. Boulder: Westview Press. • Tinto, V. (1993). 2nd Edition. Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student

attrition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Thanks for Your Participation• Questions?

• Daina Briedis briedis@egr.msu.edu• Colleen McDonough mcdono56@msu.edu• Claudia Vergara vergara@msu.edu • Jon Sticklen sticklen@msu.edu