Whalen, R., & Freeman, S. F., & Love, J. O., & Schulte Grahame, K., & Hertz, J. L. (2018, June), Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach  Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30459

\bibitem{asee_peer_30459}
  Whalen, R., \& Freeman, S. F., \& Love, J. O., \& Schulte Grahame, K., \& Hertz, J. L. (2018, June), \emph{Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach}
  Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah.
  10.18260/1-2--30459

Richard Whalen, Susan F. Freeman, Jennifer Ocif Love, Kathryn Schulte Grahame, and Joshua L. Hertz.  "Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach".  2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah, 2018, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2018.  https://peer.asee.org/30459 Internet.  12 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_30459}
  Richard Whalen, Susan F. Freeman, Jennifer Ocif Love, Kathryn Schulte Grahame, and Joshua L. Hertz.
  "Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach".
  \emph{2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah, 2018, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2018.
  https://peer.asee.org/30459 Internet.  12 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_30459
author = "Richard Whalen, Susan F. Freeman, Jennifer Ocif Love, Kathryn Schulte Grahame, and Joshua L. Hertz"
title = "Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach"
booktitle = "2018 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition "
year = "2018"
month = "June"
address = "Salt Lake City, Utah"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/30459}
number = {10.18260/1-2--30459}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - This complete evidence-based practice paper presents an update of analysis and lessons learned in a required first-year engineering curriculum at a medium sized private urban university.  A curricula redesign resulted in a “cornerstone to capstone” approach with a pilot program rolled out to 2 sections of a first-year engineering course in the Fall of 2014.  The goal of this cornerstone approach was to integrate design, programming, graphical communication, and engineering analysis previously taught in two separate first-year engineering courses by creating an 8 credit hour 14 week course that focuses on real world, hands-on design projects.  Logistical concerns related to instructor loading and classroom facilities with the 8 credit hour course led to the implementation in the Fall of 2015 of a 28 week, 2 separate 4 credit hour course version given over 2 semesters - fall and spring. Now in its third year of continued refinement and analysis, the University is offering 5 sections of the 8 credit hour course (Full Cornerstone) and 25 sections of the 2 separate 4 credit hour course (Split Cornerstone). Each section is populated with approximately 32 first-year students.  

With two versions implemented over the past two years, there have been enough redesign to warrant more discussion. This redesign has been those iterative steps of identifying new problems with the delivery and implementation, doing more research, finding many creative options for improvement, working as a team to pilot and evaluate each, and repeating.  The course design is driven by feedback and data on improvement, fundamentally following the design process we teach in the course. The data used to drive this redesign has come from four sources.  The first source is a survey of students in both the cornerstone and non-cornerstone (original 2 course sequence) sections on many topics covering textbooks, pedagogy, concepts taught, self-efficacy in engineering, and more.  The second source was the student feedback teams used in many sections of the course.  The third source is the University administered student evaluations given at the end of each semester.  The fourth source is the first-year teaching team, which met frequently and worked over each summer to improve course design and supporting materials. 

The purpose of this paper is to outline the differences between the Full versus Split Cornerstone approaches and to compare the perspectives and achievements of students taking the new Cornerstone courses versus those taking the previous course structure.  This analysis includes how both the students and instructors are affected by each approach and the lessons learned along the way to make both successful.  The paper will update the various projects and themes used to create the project based courses and analyze our forms of assessment to qualify and quantify the approach.  Overall results show that the Cornerstone approach is successful and students see a positive improvement in their perspectives on engineering and self-efficacy in their abilities to become an engineer.

	Table 1.	
How did your perspective on engineering change after taking this course? (1 to 4, negative to positive)

      All Data	       Original 2 Courses	        Cornerstone	
Average	 STD	  Average	    STD	      Average	STD
   3.798	0.717	   3.643	    0.796	         3.906     0.636

Based on your experiences so far, do you think you have the ability to become an engineer? (1 to 5, negative to positive)	

       All Data	       Original 2 Courses	        Cornerstone	
Average	 STD	 Average	    STD	      Average	STD
    4.3	 0.815	  4.270	    0.861	         4.321	0.783


AU  - Richard Whalen
AU  - Susan F. Freeman
AU  - Jennifer Ocif Love
AU  - Kathryn Schulte Grahame
AU  - Joshua L. Hertz
CY  - Salt Lake City, Utah
DA  - 2018/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/30459
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--30459
ER  -