IntroductionRetention of engineering students from their freshmen year to graduation is an important issue facing engineering schools today. The academic difficulty of an engineering education takes a toll on enrollment and a significant percentage of students that enroll as freshmen engineers do not reach graduation. Increasing the percentage of students that persevere to graduation is one of the College of Engineering (COE) at New Mexico State University's (NMSU) main goals. The first goal to help students achieve this is the Freshmen Year Experience (FYE) program. Experiential learning methods are described by much of the literature as a way to further engage students in their coursework and to introduce freshman to some of the basic concepts of engineering. A form of "student-centered education" where the instructor acts as a guide to the experiential learning process is preferred over the traditional class lecture format according to Spencer & Mehler [10] . Hixson [4] refer to this as instructor "role-modeling," where the instructor advises and nudges the students through a thought process. The decisions are ultimately made by the students and they are the owners of their solution. The research presented by Ambrose [1] similarly advocates the use of experiential learning opportunities. To better provide students with timely feedback, the in-class methods of peer instruction, case studies, and simulations lessen the slow response time of traditional grading. Introductory level classes are described by Koenig [7] , that help develop and reinforce basic reasoning skills that are critical in carrying out projects, designs, and experiments later on in STEM coursework. These classroom exercises are designed so that they scale up in difficulty. Hixon [4] calls this a "spiral curriculum," and appears to be very useful with engineering design projects.Our FYE plan is based in part on implementing these experiential learning methods in conjunction with the retention strategies developed by the ECSEL coalition, Kalonji & Gretchen [6] . The FYE is only the first year of a complete four year plan for increasing student retention. The FYE transitions in the summer to include internships, employment opportunities, group activities, and pre-advising for the fall semester. Students who successfully make it to their second year will experience continued peer-mentoring in their sophomore course load to include assistance with English, Calculus and Physics. The summer prior to their second year the students are offered the same opportunities as the summer before the first year. Plans for the junior and senior years include students hiring as peer-mentors and providing opportunities for the students to participate in undergraduate research. To achieve our goals the FYE integrates student success strategies into many facets of the student's first year in college. An integral part of this comprehensive approach is the ENGR100 "Introduction to Engineering" course. The data reported in this paper reflects a first pass at our Page 2...
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. Literature ReviewAccording to Kuh (2008) 1 freshman year experience programs are highly influential in improving student success and create positive impact on their pathway to a degree. Key components of successful FYE programs are utilizing learning communities. In addition Kuh (2008) recommends writing intensive curriculums that focus on writing across the curriculum to create a deeper sense of content through writing. One of the key components of the FYE program is the peer mentoring program. As stated by Rode and Kubic, in Johnson (2009) 2 peer mentoring can serve as a supportive liaison between the classroom, students, and faculty. In addition, mentoring can also provide beneficial college experiences for both the mentor and mentee, (Johnson, 2009). Because our University is a Hispanic serving institution, the program developers felt mentoring could play a strong role in retention of all students, including our minority students. According to Liang and Grossman (2010) 3 mentors can aide youth from diverse backgrounds. In addition, minority students who have had a mentor, show greater success in academics.
We present a work in progress that demonstrates increased engagement and academic persistence by transfer engineering students when the Lean LaunchPad™ (LLP) [1] methodology is applied to teach the engineering design process. Transfer students entering engineering programs typically do not receive the same level of attention entering freshman do. New Mexico State University (NMSU) and Howard University (HU) saw an opportunity to improve academic persistence, graduation rates, and overall experience by co-developing a program that helps transfer students be more successful. A collaborative 3-year grant was awarded from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Broadening Participation in Engineering program. The objective of the grant is to increase persistence and graduation rates by increasing engagement and by developing a sense of community amongst transfer engineering students.A week-long workshop that uses the LLP framework was developed to help students design and develop a predetermined university-oriented innovation project. During the workshop, students work in teams, interact with faculty, and visit various parts of campus. While working to identify "product-market fit," students learn about hypothesis development, test design, hypothesis testing, customer discovery, data analysis, insight generation, and the importance of an iterative process. After two years, preliminary survey results and qualitative evidence at NMSU shows the LLP workshop participants have higher GPA levels as compared to their engineering peers.
This is a Work in Progress paper and will focus on the development and implementation of a software tool for engineering entrepreneurship team selection. Students working in teams is an integral part of today's engineering learning experience. Selection of students for team placement is often done manually or in some other ad hoc fashion. We present an automated software tool we call "TeamBuilder" for forming teams in the classroom, as well as for supporting forming entrepreneurial teams. Our tool incorporates factors such as the student's personality, experience, major, and gender. TeamBuilder uses the Teamology approach, which utilizes Carl Jung's personality formula, similar to the Myers-Briggs type indicator, to classify a student's primary cognitive mode. The TeamBuilder program also incorporates a student's demographic information, enabling users to better specify the team makeup. Instructors can select and prioritize the criteria for group composition and TeamBuilder automatically builds the teams.This tool allows any instructor to quickly form teams that have diversity or similarities with respect to personality type, primary cognitive modes, academic major, specific experience or expertise, and gender. With TeamBuilder, instructors can prioritize which factors are most important for the particular team exercise. TeamBuilder also offers the ability to create completely randomized student teams. This tool can support and facilitate researchers studying the effect of team composition on student learning. Instructors can even use TeamBuilder to create randomized control teams to use as comparison to teams with specific compositions.In this paper we discuss the evolution of the TeamBuilder software and its use in the entrepreneurship team formation. We provide illustrative examples of TeamBuilder in use within courses to study the effect on students' team formation preferences. Initial data is used to directionally assess the performance of teams formed ad hoc versus with TeamBuilder.
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