Strategies for Promoting Faculty Engagement with Early STEM Students

1. Strategies for Promoting Faculty Engagement with Early STEM Students NSF DUE STEP Grantees Meeting 2012 Michigan State University College of Engineering Center for Engineering Education Research (CEER)

2. Acknowledgements This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award 0757020 (DUE). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

3. Workshop Objectives • Participants will discuss plans and strategies to develop student-faculty interactions and enhance student engagement in their institutions.

4. Workshop Structure • Work group discussions to: • Understand faculty interactions with [STEM] students. • Identify strategies to encourage sufficient and enthusiastic faculty involvement. • Summary reporting from groups • Summary provided to all participants after workshop.

5. Who Are We? Claudia Vergara, MSU Colleen McDonough, MSU DainaBriedis, MSU Jon Sticklen, MSU Tom Wolff, MSU Mark Urban-Lurain, MSU Renée DeGraaf, LCC Ruth Heckman, LCC Nat Ehrlich (external evaluator)

6. Who are you? • Introductions • Name, institution • Show of hands • STEP project (# students) • Disciplinary focus

7. Engaging Early Engineering Students (EEES) to Expand Numbers of Degree Recipients • Michigan State University (MSU) & Lansing Community College (LCC) • Our goal is to raise the matriculation-to-graduation rate in the College of Engineering by ten percentage points.

9. Issues of Persistence & Retention • Why students leave STEM (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997, Marra et al., 2012) • Poor teaching & advising • Difficult curricula • Lack of belonging • Barrier courses

10. Most students who leave STEM do so between the 1st and 2nd year. • Early engineering programs are a key factor in retention and graduation of undergraduate engineering students.

11. Contextual View of the Early STEM Experience Environmental Factors Institutional Context Classroom Experience: Personal factors: Pedagogy Climate Faculty & Student Characteristics Self-identity Challenges Strategies First-year outcomes, 2nd-year inputs Student pre-college traits Social Interactions Out-of-class Experiences Residential activities Work Advising Tutoring Peers, sports, clubs, organizations, “dating” Adapted from Pascarella &Terenzini, 1991

12. The EEES Structure • Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) program based on supplemental instruction (SI) model. • Connector Faculty (CF) program to directly engage engineering faculty with early engineering students. • Program to provide formative assessments (gateway exams) in key courses with follow-on tutorials. • A program to develop and exploit course material from one key course to another thereby enabling a "program view" by our students instead of the more typical "course silo view ”.

13. 2005 Entering freshmen who ‘declared’ engineering • We address two categories of student leavers: • Those who leave because of academic difficulties. • Those who leave because they find the educational environment of early engineering to be hostile and/or not engaging. Snapshot Summer 2007 GPA for admission 56 credits for admission

14. Strategies • Articulate type of program (in response to a challenge/problem) • Program that increases faculty engagement with early STEM students. • Desired outcomes: • Create a CF team of faculty who “care about” the early engineering students and provide encouraging contact, timely intervention, and career role modeling. • Increase retention of academically qualified students. • Understand context: • The institution. • The influences (students, faculty, administration, resources).

15. Context: Opportunity Two freshmen courses: • EGR 100: Intro to Design  • EGR 102: MATLAB-based problem solving

16. Context: Key Players • Students • Students in Engineering Design (EGR 100) • Faculty: • Become part of the CF team • NOT academic advisers • Provided resources

17. Program Approach: Students • Interact with CF in formal and informal activities: • Approx. 8 students per faculty • Face-to-face meetings • Large-group activities • Sponsored events (field trips)

18. Program Approach: Faculty • Training/orientation sessions • Guidance for intervention • Collaboration with academic advisers • Check-in communications • Troubleshooting meeting

19. The First Meeting in EGR 100

20. Addressing challenges: it’s a design process

21. 10-12 students per faculty; informal groups; orientation session for faculty; some planned field trips; first-day meeting in EGR 100 classroom ~800 students 180 faculty Encouragement for students (AND faculty) to answer e-mail; discontinue field trips; e-mail ‘engagement tips’ to faculty; orientation lowered faculty expectations & better guided informal discussion topics based on survey results Student no-shows; groups too large Difficulty recruiting enough faculty Special recruitment in departmental faculty meetings, and via the chairs and the college dean Faculty orientation/training was conducted by engineering faculty and was data-driven based on results of prior year’s student and faculty survey results Feedback on orientation session

22. Increased faculty effort by advertising successes; changed to an “opt-in” program for students; early advertising in summer orientation and on move-in day ~1000 students 180 faculty Difficulty getting students to visit faculty Link interactions with faculty to an EGR 100 class assignment Organized evening social activity, Engineering-Connect: faculty introduced students to their discipline in the context of a homework assignment based on 21st century engineering challenges What about students who did not “opt in?” Faculty burn-out in re-starting CF in spring Carried fall CF assignments through spring semester; spring EGR 100 students still had Engineering Connect, although no CF program

23. Project Evaluation • Objectives: • Determine progress toward project goals. • Document project activities, processes, and products. • Collect data to inform planning and improvement. • Mixed methods approach: • Interviews, surveys , focus groups and existing institutional data.

24. Evaluation Results • The participation rate for students and faculty is 86% and 56% respectively. • CF-students were admitted to the COE at a higher rate than non-CF. • CF-students expressed more positive attitudes about the CF program and about the likelihood of being accepted into the COE. • Student admission rate and attitude change are positively correlated with frequency of interaction with faculty. • Non-CF students were almost twice as likely to think they would choose a different major.

25. First Group Activity • Identify a challenge you would like to address. Ex: How would you connect faculty and students? • List desired goals/outcomes. • Describe the characteristics of your proposed program.

26. Second Group Activity • List environment/context aspects (internal and external) that could influence your program. • Provide a brief rationale for why these are worth noting--include the good, the bad and the ugly! • Example: • External Influences: • Market forces, accreditation agencies, disciplinary societies • Internal influences: • Institutional: Mission, resources, governance • Department/unit: Key players, (faculty, students), discipline

27. Third Group Activity • Thinking about the bad and the ugly: • Given the influences that you identified for your program, what methods, tools, or strategies might be most effective to address the challenges? • Program Components (Approach) • Identify the core activities and how they align with your goals/outcomes. • Discuss evaluation plans. What evidence do you need to gather to assess your progress toward goals? (Think formative and summative).

28. References • Briedis, D., Ehrlich, N., McDonough, C., Sticklen, J. & Wolff, T. The EEES/Connector Faculty Program: Surveys of Attitudes, Experience and Evaluations. In ASEE 2010. Paper 420 (2010). • Caffarella, R. S. (2002). Planning programs for adult learners: A practical guide for educators, trainers, and staff developers (2nd Ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. • Marra, R. M., Rodgers, K. A., Shen, D. & Bogue, B. (2012). Leaving engineering: A multi-year single institution study. Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Engineering Education. 101(1), 6-27. • Micomonaco, J. P. & Sticklen, J. (2010). Toward a better understanding of academic and social integration: A qualitative study of factors related to persistence in engineering. Proceedings of the American Association of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference, Louisville, KY. • National Science Board. (2008). Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, Volume 1. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.nsf.gov/statistiscs/seind08/ • Pascarella, E., & Terenzini, P. (1991). How college affects students. San Francisco: Jossey­Bass. • Seymour, Elaine and Nancy M. Hewitt (1997). Talking about leaving: Why undergraduates leave the sciences. Boulder: Westview Press. • Tinto, V. (1993). 2nd Edition. Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

29. Questions? DainaBriedisbriedis@egr.msu.edu Colleen McDonough mcdono56@msu.edu Claudia Vergara vergara@msu.edu Jon Sticklensticklen@msu.edu Thanks for Your Participation