Conference Session

First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 1: It's All About Teams and Teamwork

Collection

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

James E. Lewis, University of Louisville; Gerold Willing, University of Louisville; Thomas D. Rockaway, University of Louisville

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

at all good.Thus, there may have been a significant change in UTA quality between the 2012 and 2013classes. Second, there is a tendency to recalibrate grading metrics based on current information.When students perform better, our expectations for their abilities also rise. Thus, the return tomore traditional grade distribution may be due to a normalization of grades based on theprevious years’ experience.2.3 Department of Chemical EngineeringImplementation of the UTA strand in the Department of Chemical Engineering has focused onthe first three courses students will take within the department, namely Introduction to ChemicalEngineering, Introduction to Materials Science, and Material and Energy Balances. In each ofthese courses, the UTAs

Conference Session

First Year Programs Division Poster Session: The Best Place to Really Talk about First-Year Education

Collection

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Donald E. Richards, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; Michael A. Collura, University of New Haven

Tagged Divisions

First-Year Programs

questions used in the new SAM cur-riculum were similar to those from the traditional courses. Comparison of student performanceshowed that SAM students performed as well as or better than traditional students in both multi-ple choice and work-out problems in the area of dynamics. A similar study, but with a smallsample size, was conducted at the University of New Haven in the chemical engineering pro-gram23. The original sequence of two sophomore courses (Fundamentals of Chemical Engineer-ing I and II) focused on material and energy balance applications using a traditional approach.The new curriculum included a SAM course discussed earlier followed by a course that providedmore depth in material and energy balances. Student performance on the final