AC 2009-1830: INCREASING THE ENROLLMENT, RETENTION, AND SATISFACTION OF FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, COMPUTER ENGINEERING, AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a novel first-year course for undergraduate students interested in electrical engineering (EE), computer engineering (CE), and computer science (CS). Our primary goal is to realize significant improvements in several student outcomes, including: increased enrollment, retention, and satisfaction for all students— with even greater impact for students from under-represented groups. Our work is motivated, in part, by the recent downward trend in undergraduate enrollment in these areas: in the United States, from Fall 2001 to Fall 2007, enrollment declined 29.7% in EE/CE bachelor’s degree programs and it declined 18.8% in CS bachelor’s degree programs. This new, first-year course is focused on exciting, discovery-based, hands-on projects that address real-world, contemporary problems in EE/CE/CS. Students work in teams to solve these technically diverse problems and they interact with several faculty experts as they develop their solutions. Connections to how these problems and their solutions benefit society are emphasized; we expect societal impact is particularly important to the women students. As the students develop their solutions to these problems, they discover fundamental underlying concepts, problem-solving strategies, and trade-offs that arise in real EE/CE/CS problems. For example, a project in the signal processing area has students use Matlab to program and evaluate rate-based arrhythmia detection algorithms for patients with implanted cardioverter defibrillators. Through their work, the students discover the impact of computational complexity on the real-time constraint that is critical to the device’s ability to save lives. This new course was launched in the 2007-2008 academic year; 330 students enrolled in the new course and 97.9% of them completed it. For the new course, the downward trend in total enrollment for the old version of this course was arrested; moreover, women’s enrollment increased 80% (from 15 to 27). Student retention in the course increased from 94.7% in the old course to 97.9% in the new course; this higher retention rate for the new course is statistically significant. Student retention in the EE/CE/CS majors increased from 37.8% for the old course to 45.2% for the new course—with women’s retention improving dramatically from 28.1% to 64.3%; these differences are also statistically significant. An affective questionnaire administered to students at the beginning and ending of the new course showed improvement on critical issues like: satisfaction with the EE/CE/CS major choice; confidence in becoming a successful EE/CE/CS engineer; and, importance of EE/CE/CS work to society. Interestingly, these improvements were even larger for the women students. At the end of the spring semester, 100% of the women intended to major in EE/CE/CS compared to only 80.9% at the beginning of the course. Men’s major intention also increased over the semester from 89.0% to 94.5%.