Student Success-focused Engineering College Preparatory Courses

This complete evidence-based practice paper makes the case for the design and deployment of two distinct engineering college preparatory courses. A 10-hour "What's Up With Engineering?" course targets high school juniors and seniors that have some interest in, or have been directed to, engineering as a career. A 15-hour "So, You're Going to be a(n) [School] Engineer…" course targets incoming first-year engineering students, and is customizable by school. The former course will be largely deployed through high school counselor and college recruiter networks. The latter will be driven through the particular college's New Student Conference and acceptance letter matriculation processes. Impetus for these offerings are literature-based studies, peer and performance-evaluating administration observations, and my personal experiences regarding the chasm existing between the understanding of engineering and the supporting knowledge and skills of the typical college of engineering-bound high school student, and the level of knowledge and skill sets expected to exist in first-year college of engineering students by the college of engineering first-year professors. My unique perspective of hiring recent college graduates for roles in Telecom for 23 years, teaching precalculus and PLTW (Project Lead the Way) engineering courses in high school for 8 years, and now instructing first-year and second-year students at a large southwestern university, has afforded me diverse front-line experiences involving a wide range of instructional differentiation practices required to address the varying levels of college of engineering preparation observed in a wide array of engineering-bound students. Two common challenges that I encounter each semester are base drivers for the development and deployment of these engineering preparatory courses. (1) The majority of my students share that their parents, a neighbor, family members, or guidance counselors noted that they were good at math and/or science, and advised that they should study engineering. (2) The first course in the 1st year sequence at a large southwestern university is programming, and 65+% of the students have no prior knowledge of coding or programming. The primary goal of the "What's Up With Engineering?" course is to assist high school students with making a more informed decision regarding selecting to pursue engineering as a profession. A strong secondary benefit is potential concurrent education of high school student advising networks regarding what is involved in a career as a professional engineer. Many students select engineering following counselor guidance referencing significant math and science capabilities, but the students often do not fully understand the myriad opportunities and rigorous cognitive demands that populate their chosen path. Consequently, many first-year college engineering programs include weekly career opportunity explorations as part of their coursework to introduce the incoming freshmen to the many engineering options. Moving this student learning to a pre-college course would provide students with more clarity of direction, and reduce the first semester learning load. The primary goal of "So, You're Going to be a(n) [School] Engineer…" is to better prepare incoming college of engineering students for both the environmental and academic challenges ahead. Much of the academic preparation in the courses is pre-teaching key concepts and developing supporting skill sets. A strong secondary benefit is to establish a clearly defined and easily accessible level of preparation expectations for prospective students and high school instructors to reference as they work in conjunction to prepare the student for early success in the college of engineering of choice. This paper will reference literature supporting the case for such preparatory courses, document, in detail, the topics covered in each hour of each college preparatory course, and be accompanied by a working, potentially live, model of both courses. Course deployment strategies will also be explored to include discussion of platform and performance monitoring opportunities. Effectiveness will be measured with pre-assessments and mastery checks throughout the course modules as well as year-over-year and peer-to-peer student readiness evaluations by professors of the first-years students. Benefits of student completion of these courses will be increased retention, improved student performance, and a widely available digital course that will prove most beneficial to the underserved populations with limited access to much of the knowledge and skills incorporated into the courses.