Enriched student guidance and engagement in lower level engineering gatekeeper courses

Board 152: An Ecosystem for Success in Engineering and Computer Science

“…Activity 3 focuses on lower-level engineering gatekeeper courses to provide students with guidelines and information to promote successful independent learners with best study practice skills [2]. In particular, most of the results presented in this study were obtained in the Statics course because it is one of the first fundamental engineering courses in almost all engineering careers.…”

“…Lectures to review prerequisite material and prepare for the pre-test Online homework to review prerequisite material and prepare for the pre-test Test about prerequisite material Identification of at-risk students Online concept inventory implemented at the beginning and at the end of the course Motivational, socioeconomic, and demographics survey Online assessments as formative assessments throughout the course Face to face and online mentoring sessions Develope challenges to integrate knowledge Identification of online resources that could be used as supplementary instruction Table 2 shows that the Statics sections passing results vary between 61% and 72% since Fall 2014, and before the intervention the passing rate was 59% in the spring of 2013. It is important to note that the results may be dependent on the number of students in the course and their prerequisite preparation and knowledge retention as shown by online review and pretest average [2,7,8]. Interventions, including peer mentoring, have contributed to increase passing rates as well as the number of students receiving final grades of A or B, and also not a significant number of students are dropping the course.…”