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Characterizing the Curricular Complexity Faced by Transfer Students: 2+2, Vertical Transfers, and Curricular Change

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Issues Facing STEM Programs at Rural Two-Year Colleges

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41462

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41462

Download Count

346

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Paper Authors

biography

David Reeping University of Cincinnati

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Dr. David Reeping is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He received his B.S. in Engineering Education with a Mathematics minor from Ohio Northern University. His main research interests include curricular complexity, transfer student pathways, threshold concepts, and advancing quantitative and fully integrated mixed methods.

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Dustin Grote Weber State University

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Abstract

This paper reviews a method for quantifying the accessibility of a curriculum for transfer students. When first conceptualized, the Curricular Analytics framework implicitly described the trajectory of a first-time-in-college student. Accordingly, using the metrics within the framework for transfer student pathways does not appear to have the same predictive power for estimating completion rates as they do for first-time-in-college pathways. Thus, we adapted metrics inspired by the literature and previous work in quantifying the complexity of curricula to better capture issues more commonly faced by transfer students from a structural perspective. To highlight how the metrics operate, we purposefully selected three engineering programs and then formed plans of study by selecting a feeder school for each and concatenating the curricula – using information from course catalogs to confirm the timing of offerings and prerequisites. Our three examples are a 2+2 program, a program within a statewide community college system, and a program that underwent a large curricular change. Through these examples, we highlight how practitioners and researchers can do substantial curricular analyses, both retrospective and forward-looking, with only available data.

Reeping, D., & Grote, D. (2022, August), Characterizing the Curricular Complexity Faced by Transfer Students: 2+2, Vertical Transfers, and Curricular Change Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41462

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