Arlington, Virginia
March 12, 2023
March 12, 2023
March 14, 2023
Professional Engineering Education Papers
10
10.18260/1-2--45027
https://peer.asee.org/45027
137
Sally Pardue, Ph.D., is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Tennessee Tech University, and former director (2009 - 2018) of the Oakley Center for Excellence in the Teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Taylor Chesson is an Online Instructional Design Specialist in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Tennessee Technological University. She enjoys working alongside instructors to combine traditional teaching methods with best pedagogical practices and emerging technologies. Prior to her role at Tennessee Tech, she worked as a Library Media Specialist.
With programmatic evaluation and recent aggregated college level data informing our need for immediate action, our mechanical engineering program is implementing two new courses for first-year students. Mechanical Engineering (ME) Fundamentals 1 and 2 is a fully coordinated sequence designed to actively engage students and equip them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) necessary for a career in the mechanical engineering profession. Two courses are built from the ground up using a variety of course planning tools, leveraging numerous best practices in engineering education. We describe the twelve-month collaborative design process for the course sequence and offer candid discussion of key challenges faced. During Fall 2022, ME Fundamentals 1 is piloted with a cohort of 39 first-year students, who will continue as a cohort in ME Fundamentals 2 during Spring 2023. The pilot cohort represents approximately 16% of the full enrollment of first-year mechanical engineering students at our institution. The literature supports the importance of first-year experiences with the major; however, our current ME program of study does not directly engage our majors until mid-way in year two as sophomores. While our pilot implementation is not conducting a rigorous engineering education research plan, we are undertaking various direct measures of course delivery and student achievement with cognitive and affective domain learning objectives. We anticipate conducting longitudinal tracking of the cohort as they progress through the major, with the hypothesis that we retain a higher percentage of students in the major because of this first-year experience in mechanical engineering.
Pardue, S. J., & Pardue, B. A., & Chesson, T. (2023, March), ME Fundamentals 1 and 2: a new course sequence for first-year mechanical engineering Paper presented at ASEE Southeast Section Conference, Arlington, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--45027
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