Work‐in‐Progress: Using First‐Year Engineering Laboratory to Improve a Student’s Readiness to Pursue an Engineering Degree.

Work in Progress: First‐Year Engineering Laboratory (FYEL) is a course usually taken by freshman engineering students during one semester of their first year at the FAMU‐FSU College of Engineering. The course is designed to meet three primary objectives: (1) inspire students by reinforcing their desire to pursue engineering as a professional career, (2) orient students to the university environment by presenting information designed to ease their transition from high school, and (3) introduce students to a set of technical and social skills which are needed to complete an engineering degree program. Although the technical content of our course is not overly difficult, we still find that some students are unable to complete it with a satisfactory grade. This is troubling since we have previously reported that good performance in this course correlated well to degree completion in engineering. Academic preparedness as measured by high school grade point average and college placement test scores are some obvious factors to consider. However, others may also be just as important. These may include the high school a student attended, a student's access to technology, and the intrinsic motivation or mindset of a student. This work‐in‐progress will report on some of our findings as we examine the firstyear students who completed the course during a fall semester between 2013 and 2017. We especially look at the performance of these students on the FYEL midterm. This is a multiple choice test which is worth 20% of a student's overall grade and is normally given around week 8 or 9 in the semester. We are using Bloom's Taxonomy to classify each question to determine if a relationship exists between the type of questions which separate the top students from those in the bottom quartile. We also examine factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, instructional method, and course instructor. With these results, it may be possible to develop specific interventions to assist students in closing the preparation gap thus improving their likelihood of completing an engineering degree program.