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Creating a Catalog and Meta-Analysis of Freshman Programs for Engineering Students: Part 2: Learning Communities

Matthew W. Ohland, Rachel E. Collins General Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634

Abstract

Curriculum modification and the implementation of special programs are two primary ways to improve the freshman year experience for engineers. Following a SUCCEED-sponsored Freshman Engineering Programs Best Practices Conference held in Charlotte, NC, in May 2000, a catalog and meta-analysis of freshman programs for students in US engineering colleges is underway. This paper will briefly describe the larger project, which will study a variety of approaches to improving the success of freshman engineering students, and specifically report on the catalog and meta-analysis of summer bridge programs. The catalog will classify programs by their design options and the meta-analysis will review highlights of assessment results drawing generalizations where possible.

Introduction

Across the country, there is an extensive base of experience in the design and implementation of programs intended to improve the success of first-year engineering students. Significant resources have been spent to identify best practices in the education of first-year students (in general), including entire organizations and conferences. 1 It is safe to say that every institution that educates engineering students employs some strategy to introduce those students to the school and to engineering. Given the universal presence of some strategy for acclimating engineering students, published descriptions of these programs are less common than we might expect. Considerably fewer have published assessment data on their programs. As a result, many studies of such programs fall short of producing a true meta-analysis, which relies on finding a reasonable number of analyses.

The College Board’s “Priming the Pump” study, which analyzed a wide variety of programs targeting minority success, faced this challenge—after beginning with a literature search and proceeding to brochures and word of mouth, the researchers eventually realized that nearly every campus had at least one program designed to foster minority student success. The study goes on to reduce the scope of the study by grouping programs by exemplars, archetypical programs with roots around the country, yet with some form of meaningful assessment. 2 Since most programs were not founded on a particular research model, they were classified by their features rather than by their research model. 3

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Collins, R., & Ohland, M. (2002, June), Creating A Catalog And Meta Analysis Of Freshman Programs For Engineering Students: Part 2: Learning Communities Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10110