Intended and Unintended Consequences of Rapidly Expanding an Engineering Mathematics Intervention for Incoming First-Year Students

Abstract

Boulder. Her research focuses on ways to encourage more students, especially women and those from nontraditional demographic groups, to pursue interests in the eld of engineering. Janet assists in recruitment and retention efforts locally, nationally, and internationally, hoping to broaden the image of engineering, science, and technology to include new forms of communication and problem solving for emerging grand challenges. A second vein of Janet's research seeks to identify the social and cultural impacts of technological choices made by engineers in the process of designing and creating new devices and systems. Her work considers the intentional and unintentional consequences of durable structures, products, architectures, and standards in engineering education, to pinpoint areas for transformative change.

Mandatory but not Required: Examining Change in the Year Two Implementation of a Novel Engineering Mathematics Course

“…The types of institutional data collected include student demographics, course outcome, performance and persistence metrics. The institutional dataset is pulled from campus sources after each subsequent academic term so that longitudinal student performance and persistence can be tracked [10] .…”

“…The cumulative first-semester GPA for the students who completed the course was 2.75, compared to 1.93 for students who withdrew from the course partway through and 2.78 for engineering students simultaneously enrolled in Pre-Calculus who were never enrolled in the Y2 pilot (n = 33). Additional assessment data related to Y2 implementation is also available in [10] .…”

Minority Status and Belonging: Engineering Math as a Vehicle to Build Community

“…Thus, the students were taking 8 credits total of math in their first semester. In each year of the pilot, student enrollment was handled differently, as summarized in Table 1 (2017 and 2018 are described in more detail in [30,[34][35][36]). Note that some students withdrew from the course.…”

“…In 2019 there was additional emphasis placed on integrating real world engineering examples into the course. More details are provided in [30,[35][36][37].…”

“…A strong focus of the course in all years was to avoid deficit thinking and messaging [36][37][38][39]. This began with the first emails to students over the summer when they were enrolled, describing the course as an "authentic immersion" into engineering where they would be using real engineering tools in real engineering contexts to solve real engineering problems.…”