Work-In-Progress: Applying Peer Mentorship in a First Year Engineering Course to Improve Student Learning and Retention Outcomes

First-year engineering students face many challenges during the transition from high school to a university setting. They may struggle to feel integrated within the university community, and can find it difficult to connect with their academic program, faculty members, and peers. These challenges often pose barriers to academic success and retention. Mentorship programs for first-year students have been adopted by many universities to help students with this transition. Undergraduate peer mentorship allows first-year students to gain institutional knowledge, connect with the program community, and gain valuable relationships with upper-level students who can serve as resources and mentors. We have begun to develop a similar approach at Anderson University specifically for our first-year engineering students. In addition to serving as a resource for institutional connection, our peer mentors also serve as technical mentors. Our peer mentorship program is coupled with the engineering design project in the first-semester Intro to Engineering course, and mentors review their group's designs and progress and offer project management support. There are two specific research questions we wish to address related to peer mentorship: 1. Does peer mentorship lead to better retention outcomes? 2. Does technical mentorship by upper-level engineering students lead to better understanding of engineering design fundamentals? This paper includes a short review of examples where mentorship has been successful in undergraduate engineering education, a detailed description of the system implemented at Anderson University, and initial survey and learning outcome results to address the specific research questions described. This work is only in its beginning stages, and will be implemented for several more years to assess long term retention outcomes and student understanding of engineering design fundamentals.