A quantification of conceptual understanding of students in statics was undertaken. Drawing on a prior study identifying the fundamental concepts and typical student errors in statics, multiple choice questions were devised to probe students' ability to use concepts in isolation. This paper describes a testing instrument comprising such questions, as well as psychometric analyses of test results of 245 students at five universities.

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Longitudinal studies using seven years of student record data were recently performed on the students participating in a freshman-engineering program (called TIDE) and on students in a comparison group. The results show that: I ) a statistically significant largerpercentage of TIDE students graduated in engineering lhan students from the comparison group; and 2) there was no significant difference in academic performance (RS measured by final GPA) between TIDE and traditional students. TIDE students entering the university ready for calculus had a 14% better graduation rate (significance level of a = 0.001). students entering ready for pre-calculus had a 16% better graduation rate (a = 0.10). women entering ready for calculus had a 23% better graduation rate (a = 0.001) and women entering ready for pre-calculus had a 26% better graduation rate (a = 0.05). Thepaper briefly describes the TIDEprogram. presents the data, and discusses the results. Index Terms -freshman engineering program, retention, under-represented groups OVERVIEW OF THE TIDE PROGRAMThe UA freshman-engineering program, now called TIDE, grew out of a prototype program developed as part of the NSF-supported Foundation Coalition.The FoundationCoalition (FC), composed of seven partner schools, emphasized four areas for improving undergraduate engineering education: curriculum integration, teamwork and collabolative learning, technology in the classroom, and continuous assessment and evaluation.mathematics, mechanical engineering and physics developed the curriculum for the prototype program during the 1993-1994 academic year. The primary goal of the faculty developing the curriculum was to improve student learning. Toward this end, UA faculty from the departments of chemistry, Course topics were substantially rearranged to achieve better integration between chemistry, mathematics and physics, Students worked in four-person teams in the new math, physics, chemistry and engineering courses, and All courses (except labs) were taught in new computerequipped classrooms.Because the topics in the new FC courses were rearranged to achieve better integration, students could not take a first-semester FC course and a second-semester traditional course. Although exceptions were made on a case-by-case basis, the majority of students took all of the FC courses. Students therefore went to their chemistry, mathematics, physics and engineering courses with the same group of students. Furthermore, they sat with the same team of four students in each lecture and worked with the same team for the chemistry lab, mathematics recitation, physics lab and engineering design projects.The chemistry and physics courses assigned team lab reports and the engineering course assigned team design projects. The reports and projects required the four-person teams to meet several times per week outside of class. This had two results. First, the students usually met in the new computer-equipped classrooms and soon got in the habit of going to the classrooms in the evenings to study. Seco...

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