The ENE Explorer Fellowship includes seven first-semester ENE graduate students who have worked on projects related to assessment and programmatic improvement of the First-Year Engineering (FYE) program. The projects are designed to be relatively small, introductory, and exploratory. They provide the FYE program with data, interpretations, and guidance across a suite of FYE issues. The projects span the scope of research methods from a statistical quantitative study of a large data set, to large survey data collection and analysis, to qualitative exploratory interviews. The seminar will include three project presentations; each will include an overview, a discussion of scope, and preliminary results and conclusions. All three projects are ongoing (and all have been submitted to the ASEE Conference next summer).

1. Attitudes indicative of entrepreneurial behavior in first-year students

Todd Fernandez and Gennison Coutinho

This project used a modified entrepreneurial attitudes survey instrument to measure characteristics of first-year students. A baseline of first-year student attitudes towards entrepreneurship has significant potential to identify and inform programming in entrepreneurship, as well as general curriculum and pedagogy. The initial results presented explore demographic correlations to attitude sub-scores compared against prior uses of the instrument.

2. The decision to accept or decline AP calculus credit: correlations to student success

Karen De Urquidi and Dina Verdin

First-year engineering students who earn Calculus credit via the Advanced Placement (AP) program have the choice of accepting the credit and starting in Calculus II or III, or declining the credit and retaking Calculus I. When students ask for recommendations on whether to retake Calculus I in college or accept their AP Calculus credit, advisors in a first year engineering program must advise in the absence of quantitative data on student success patterns. This presentation will offer insight based upon previous student academic records, which may inform advisors and incoming first year students on whether or not to accept AP Calculus credit.

3. “Self-led exploration” in learning about the disciplines: where students get the information that they don’t get from us

Zahra Atiq, Hector Rodriguez-Simmonds, and Juan Ortega-Álvarez

This research uses interviews to explore the sources of information used by first-year students in deciding which engineering discipline to pursue. The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to understand how students make an informed decision of which engineering major to pursue and (2) to help administration improve the resources provided to students based on this information. We will discuss our initial findings, highlighting the things that stick out of the original expectations, according to our initial data.