Student success through college of engineering freshman year experience program

Abstract

This is a Work in Progress (WIP) paper and will focus on the Freshman Year Experience (FYE) program implemented at New Mexico State University, a Hispanic serving institution. Due to the low retention rate of 63.9% for first-year, full time engineering students, prior to the 2014-2015 school year, (persistence from matriculation to their sophomore year) the College of Engineering (COE) made a decision to implement a FYE program. The program was designed to help retain students in the COE and in addition, provide students with strategies to succeed in college. The COE first-year student retention rate rose by 14.6% to a total of 78.5% from freshman year to sophomore year. The overarching goals for the program were to help facilitate the transition from high school to University learning environments. The program implemented problem based learning, flipped classroom instruction, discovery of student resources on campus, among numerous other FYE and engineering curriculum instructional strategies. We have made several key changes to the ENGR 100 course since the first semester of its implementation in the fall 2014. Some of these modifications include changing the mathematics co-requisite course to college algebra, in order to reach more students. We have also implemented a mandatory peer mentor led workshop for all students. Peer mentors provide the students with an upper classman peer who can provide support inside and outside of the classroom. In our paper we will continue to discuss specifics regarding the ENGR 100 course, peer mentoring, intervention strategies, and FYE components.