Addressing First-year Issues in Engineering Education

Abstract

Many concerns have been raised about professional training versus education and whether one should teach the fundamentals first or help to inspire first year studnets so they become motivated. In order ro address some of the more blocal first-year issues there have been several international conferences held on the FYE, and in the US a National research Centre for the FYE has been set up and the Journal of the Freshman Year Experience was established in 1989. Baillie made an inventory of initiatives for enhancing the FYE. She found 8 different issues that were addressed by engineering schools all over the world. "It is evident that the most common reasons for focusing on the first year were student learning and preparing studenrs for better learning throughout the degree programme, bu onlyu in two cases were these expressed as the major reasons". Baillie also found 8 approaches that were adopted to adress abovementioned issues. she reports that the 'new course' was frequently chosen as an approach and that persons involved have published about these interventions. "Research into the problem" was also mentioned a number of times, but persons involved almost never published about this. Generally there were three methods used for evaluation of the approach: student feedback, by interview, survey, focus group or observation. Student assessment by reviewing studnet grades to see if the failure rate had lessened or increased. Skills development by employing special tests to assess students critical thinking or creativity before and after a course. What worked and why - Short introductory course: "Generally it is believed that the journey into the university is aided by these schemes and that relationships are vastly improved between staff and students. However, some survey respondends suggest that an isolated week is no good unless it is backed up by support from staff during the first year. - Addition of extra material or help for a particular aspect of a course - New overheuled subject. Course planners of introductory courses wanted to see that the course really is an intro to engineering rather than just labelled that. Such courses were dconsidered successful in developing an awareness of the engineering profession and in particular ways of thinking and attitudes necessary for the practitioner. Interactive approaches were mostly adopted, as it was felt if wer are going to preach teamwork, we felt that we had to lead by example. .... It is, however, considered important for students to think about what engineering is." - Entire curriculum change. this requires a huge ack up of resources. there are particular concerns about hw to assess certain skills and team work. - Mentoring/tutoring by staff. Those institutions involving mentors suggested that studnets would feel better supported by the presence of staff tutors if they planned their sessions with various activities. It was reported by several institutions that mentoring schimes could be worse than useless if the staff did not at responsibilty in their role and did not see it as their job to be avilable for the studtn. The advice seems to be that such a scheme can only be voluntary in countries where it is not already considered part of academic duties, as in the UK. - Peer tutoring. The advantages of peer tutoring were reported to be that fellow sutdnets were open and empathic in a way that academic staff could not be, it increased interaction between the years and often saved staff time. Baillie goes on to discuss difficulties with evaluating the effectiveness of the approaches. Using student grades has problems, because the assessments are often inappropriate for the new course. If you teach new skills, a comparison of grades is meaningless as well. There are difficulties with both qualitative and quantitative appraoches. Often interview and discussion group material can be interpreted favourable, it is impossible to be objective about something wer have developed and own. Hence, it is often difficult to use interview quoted to convince people of the success of a scheme. However, it is also difficult to convince people using statistics only, and it seems that a triangulation of three approaches it the minimum if the data are to be used as evidence of success in achieving desired aims. Baillie supplies us with a list of things to do for successful implementation of new schemes.

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