James G. Ladesic, Ph.D., P.E.,
Professor, Aerospace Engineering,
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Catherine A. McClellan, M.Ed.,
Mathematics Coordinator, Student Success Center,
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
achievement expected of them by college faculty. A philosophy is forming among the faculty involved in AE101 that the first semester of the freshman year should be dedicated, in a focused and orchestrated way across all freshmen courses, to teaching freshmen first how to be successful students, with the remainder of their college program concentrated on their education and the development of a lifetime of learning.
AE101, a course originally intended to introduce freshmen Aerospace Engineering students to topics of their program and to elements of their chosen profession,
has evolved into an ensemble of activities, actions, plans and intrusive interventions into the college freshmen's life. Attempts to help entering freshmen adjust to college life have uncovered some surprising insights into multifarious problems today's freshmen often encounter. They have produced a preliminary diagnosis of a major problem many of the students have, and have had unexpected byproducts in synthesizing teaching effectiveness discussions across previous departmental barriers and in reducing parochial interests. The net effect has faculty pro-actively working as a team to find new solutions to an old problem: changing freshmen into successful students. The scope of this introductory course has changed in many aspects, from introducing fundamental topics to dealing with the deaths of loved ones in the students' lives, from classical college lectures to group discussions of personal problems and from taking class attendance to physically tracking down absent students in order to determine the causes of their absence. Involvement in the program has increased faculty awareness of a host of previously unrecognized obstacles in the freshman year, and hopefully started faculty on the track to getting freshmen past them and on to academic success.
The preparedness of today's aerospace engineering college freshmen is less than that of students from previous decades while the amount of material that is included in the topics representing the engineering bachelor-level degree has significantly increased. New faculty hiring in engineering colleges across the nation has slowed in recent time, a result that reflects both industry and governmental program trends, leaving most mathematics, physical sciences and engineering departments with a more mature aggregate population. Often these faculty teach freshmen level courses where the non-success rate (grades of F, D, Withdrawal, Incomplete or Audit) can be as high as 55%. As a rule, these faculty do not consider topics that address remedies for the students physical and emotional adjustments to the college environment or the lack of student skill preparedness appropriate material to include as part of their technical courses, relying instead on courses in the humanities and on university counseling personnel or dean's assistants to address such troubles. The net outcome has been a substantial misunderstanding on the part of the faculty as to why students fail to perform in their classes and an associated decrease in freshmen success.
Historically there has been consistent agreement among educators and employers that most high school education is deficient in preparing individuals for college life and for jobs [1, 2]. Today the situation seems to be at an all time low. In an attempt to compensate for national and international variations in high school course content, individual grades from different teachers and interpretations of SAT scores, colleges have adopted the use of placement exams as popular methods for evaluating freshmen students. These have become the primary instruments employed in determining the ``proper entry level placement'' for English, physical sciences and mathematics. These exams may be standardized or may be authored within the institution. We have used both at ERAU and have had similar results.
Evidence indicates that placing entry level students with deficient study habits and poor time management skills in any college course, regardless of previous exposure to the material, has contributed very little toward bolstering their success rate. As an example (Figure 1), thorough screening by way of the placement exam in mathematics at ERAU frequently has placed students with good grades in high school courses like pre-calculus and advanced algebra in our MA140 ``College Algebra''. The non-success rate of these students, who some say are evidently under-challenged, has been approximately 54%, on par with those who were placed in these same courses without similar high school preparation or who were repeating the course or even those who had taken remedial courses at a lower level prior to taking the course. Although the percentage of non-success changes and varies anywhere from 20%to about 62%, depending on the discipline and course, this trend is preserved. Figure 1 illustrates the non-success trend for MA140 ``College Algebra'' over a three year period. Figure 2 gives the course placement suggested as a result of the freshmen the placement exam as contrasted with the actual enrollments for the Fall 1994 school term.
The reason for the trouble appears to lie in the student notion that habits they found adequate for their high school successes will be sufficient for meeting college-level expectations. The material they encounter during the first few weeks of their first term may serve to reinforce such a notion, and the entry level courses they take do little to cultivate the skills needed for future college success. Instead, only course topic material is presented from the first day of class onward, some material that may be very familiar to the individual and thus further substantiate the notion that ``college will be easy''. Others who struggle from the onset may have difficulty talking about their troubles or what they do not understand and simply accept their predicament as the ``way it should be''. As the course pace builds and becomes more demanding and as the material compresses, both groups find the level of effort required is keener than they anticipated and by the first exam they are all generally beyond the point of successful achievement due the accumulated knowledge and skills deficit. They are unsupervised for the most part and are free to chose where and on what they will spend their time. They are unfamiliar with time management concepts and are apt to be myopic in their planning, if they plan at all, and unfortunately there is little substantive material contained in their courses to help them overcome these deficiencies.
To further aggravate this problem, freshmen engineering students, being young and generally impatient, often become disillusioned with the prospect and scope of their education. Not seeing immediate ties between their chosen discipline and the English, science or mathematics courses they must take, they all too often become bewildered and give up on such courses, adding to the poor course success rate. The teachers of these courses normally do not share the engineering interest of their students and may not pose applications, exercises intended as motivators, beyond their own personal non-engineering interests. Students simply do not possess the maturity nor the skills to absorb much of the material they are presented with nor do they retain it for later application in their discipline courses.
At Embry-Riddle, AE101 is a two-credit course originally intended to introduce freshmen Aerospace Engineering (AE) students to topics of their program and to elements of their chosen profession with the intention of providing some of the relevant associations. Formerly this included brief discussions about the profession with introductions to aerodynamics, aeronautics, propulsion and structures, along with a simple design project at the end of the term,
all in a classical lecture classroom setting. Without exception, it was the design project that the students consistently rated as the thing they enjoyed most about the course. Class size would often range up to 65 students. For the most part, AE101 was like so many other courses-a stand-alone, information-oriented course where, to the faculty, student identities where relegated to a roster list and a group of faces. It was one of five essentially autonomous courses students took in their first semester, as illustrated in Figure 3.
During the Spring term of 1994, in an attempt to improve student success along with retention, AE101 was integrated into the Student Success program, a University-wide freshmen success program funded by the U.S. Department of Education under a Title III Grant for Strengthening Institutions. Five of the senior members from the Aerospace Engineering department, who had been repeatedly recognized for their outstanding teaching abilities and the interest they take in their students, were asked to participate in this program as faculty mentors. All five took part in a 30-hour training course offered by the Student Success Center that helped them become aware of freshmen student issues and needs. One of the faculty members was assigned academic advising and inter-department coordination responsibilities for the entire freshmen group, approximately 160 students, in order to maintain continuity. The rest were assigned to a part of the AE101 course delivery and shared some of the advising duties. In addition, four junior-level undergraduate students, who themselves had successfully struggled for survival as freshmen, were recruited and completed similar training to function as peer mentors for assigned freshmen groups.
The AE101 course was re-organized into two parts: a weekly one hour group for 40 to 50 students which would be taught in a lecture format by one of the faculty mentors and an array of smaller weekly ``precept'' groups consisting of no more than 15 students with one of the other faculty mentors in charge. A peer mentor was assigned to each precept and also attended one of the lectures each week. A schematic of this concept is illustrated in Figure 4. Each week the topic of the lecture discussion centered on a common theme that would be explored, exercised and discussed in some detail in the precept according to the common interests of the faculty mentor, peer mentor and the student group.
Lectures, intended to represent the format and environment common to most college courses, were ``chunked'' into 10-15 minute mini-presentations where the topics were shifted from student success to engineering in order to maintain interest. The weekly themes on topics such as note-taking techniques, time management methods, professional success, determining the individual student 's attention span, self help, stress management, etc., were used along with engineering conceptual topics like the application of Newton's laws to a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rocket. To act as a catalyst in the process, two ``freshmen design projects'' that were tackled by precept teams were used to launch engineering discussions and to control and coordinate the direction of the many smaller precept meetings; one using an SSTO rocket and the other a simplified airplane preliminary design. Theories related to the projects were the origins of the topics used in the lectures. Every attempt was made to associate these project topics to the appropriate basic science or math topic the students would be experiencing in their other courses. The lectures were used to introduce concepts supportive of the design projects and to give the students an interactive opportunity to develop their note-taking skills, quiz-taking skills and to work on improving their attention span within a lecture format period of 50 minutes.
In order to coordinate the activities between lectures and precepts and also to track student progress in other courses, weekly monitoring sessions
were conducted with representatives from the graphical communication courses, math courses, physics courses (It is planned to also include the freshman English courses in the future.) and all of the involved AE faculty and peer mentors. The interactive association of this effort is illustrated in Figure 5. The subjects of discussion focused on student performance, attendance and problems. In the beginning there surfaced, from time to time, a mild hostility between faculty members from different departments, which apparently stemmed from traditional parochial departmental interests and dominion issues. As the effort matured such hostility dissolved and genuine cooperation between department representatives was observed. Action items were assigned to the appropriate individual for follow up for each critical assessment made. The scope of the AE101 introductory course was adjusted to accommodate or react to any need that was identified. Recognition of student problems covered a wide range of involvement, mentoring, counseling and referral. Cases ranged from the deaths of loved ones, to problems stemming from attention deficits in classical lecture situations, to broken romances and confidential discussions of individual student personal problems. Sometimes the problem was repeated absences and it became necessary to dispatch a peer mentor or faculty member to physically track down the students involved in order to determine the causes for their absences.
The collective results of all these activities produced a restructuring of the entire freshman first semester. Discussions from the Monitoring Sessions led the Physical Sciences Department, in cooperation with the Department of Mathematics, to propose converting its two course, ten credit hour engineering physics sequence into two three-hour and one four-hour course. The first three-hour course has been designed to be topically harmonious with the first semester calculus course, providing supportive physical examples and applications of differential calculus in parallel with the calculus course. The first course of this new physics sequence also replaces a five credit chemistry course, a course where the non-success rate has been as great as 50%and the chemistry course will be moved into the third term where both the student maturity and the topical relationship with other courses is more logical.
The rationale for moving the chemistry forward in the curriculum and replacing it with the three-hour physics course is based on the fact that the majority of the AE freshmen traditionally report a sincere dislike for chemistry and, from observations made, the majority of the same students are motivated by the application of mathematics to physical problems more so than from the pure elegance of mathematical closure. The close association of the material of the physics course with the topics of the math course should aid in developing the students' understanding and use of the calculus. The graphical communications course replaces classical graphics and is designed to help students visualize, learn to sketch artistically, to aid them in understanding free body diagrams in physics, and to learn to communicate through pictures they draw, all skills truly needed by today's typical engineering student. It is hoped that the immediate reinforcement built from the math-physics couple will be further bolstered by applications in AE101 design projects and the use of graphics throughout will prove to be synergistic, enabling students to retain more of the fundamental principles they will need in later courses.
An unexpected result of all this has been a demonstration of how faculty from different disciplines and departments can overcome departmental barriers on issues of domain and pro-actively interact as a team to develop new solutions to old problems: changing freshmen into successful students. Figure 6 illustrates the fundamental changes an the inter-relationships between the new first semester courses as they transpired from this exercise.
Results of the first year experiment with just AE101 and the math and physics monitoring were encouraging. The results of the fall 1994 physics will be used as a baseline measure, as the AE freshmen did not previously take their first physics course until after the first calculus course, normally in the second or third semester. The success rate in the first semester calculus course was 62.34%, a slight decrease from the previous three years' average of 63.06%, a value not too surprising owing to major adjustments in material delivery that were needed because of the math and physics co-requsite and the newness of the program. The bright note appeared in the percent of students who, in spite of what grades they had received, decided not to quit but continue their engineering program studies. The percent of students enrolled in the AE program that did not return to ERAU after their first semester drop to 5.6%, i.e. one half, of what it had been in previous years. A positive sign of the impact of the program is that a significant increase in overall freshmen grade point average was detected, measured against the previous three fall semesters AE freshmen grades (The statistical index of significance being at 99.5%or alpha = 0.005).
Many of the faculty who have been involved in this AE101 experiment are in agreement with a pedagogical model that would focus the first semester and perhaps even the entire first college year, in an orchestrated way across all courses, to teach freshmen first how to be successful as students before attempting to saturate them with concepts, laws and fundamentals. The remainder of the students' college program could then be progressively intensified in the specific discipline, attaining better overall educational objectives and intellectual development of the group to more effectively prepare them for a lifetime of learning. The engineering freshmen year must be designed to compensate for lack of student preparedness from high schools until the high schools themselves begin to effectively address the problem. The freshman experience should ramp the individual student skills upward, in the direction of faculty expectations. To this extent this experience must still address the classical fundamentals in English, mathematics and the physical sciences but, if increases in the percentage of students that successfully complete an engineering program are sought, then it must also include:
Young students clearly need to feel they are a part of something, so it makes unequivocal sense to introduce them to their chosen discipline, to familiarize them to activities that provide opportunities for professional growth, and to involve them in constructive extra-curricular activities that will apply to and strengthen their resumes upon graduation. The Aerospace Engineering faculty that were involved in the program described have increased their awareness of a host of previously unrecognized problems and obstacles students encounter in their freshman year. Working individually, faculty from other departments (English, Math and Physics), while familiar of many of these student problems because of their long time association with the freshmen courses, have had only limited successes. The combined awareness and efforts of this collective faculty group have yielded a pedagogical environment where students are improving their academic performance in the freshman year. It is hoped that such awareness and continued cooperation will propagate throughout the faculty ranks, getting all freshmen on track to academic success.
