2006-1075: A FRESHMAN COURSE IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING: MERGING FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCES WITH DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC NEEDS

In many engineering curriculums, the first opportunity for students to become acquainted with their discipline is in the sophomore or junior years. While such an approach allows for general freshman and/or sophomore engineering classes, it creates other problems as well as misses several opportunities. At our university, we have designed a 1-credit class for first semester freshman enrolled in chemical engineering. This course, which was designed with much student input, includes a variety of areas such as: (1) time management, (2) departmental indoctrination, (3) meeting the faculty, (4) how do all the courses fit into the curriculum, (5) hands-on experimentation, (6) what chemical engineers do in practice and (7) student research opportunities Such a course looks to cultivate the intrinsic interest that students have in this area while addressing issues which are important in sustaining these students to graduation. In this paper, we discuss the lessons learned from this course as well as provide assessment information for use in future offerings. Student assessment of this course indicated that, on average, the course was effective at reaching the stated goals (score of 4.2 out of 5.0). Each class session itself was assessed by the students. The top performers were the three “hands-on” experiments that were performed. In a students’ comments section of the assessment, it was emphasized that more “hands-on” work should be included when this course is offered next semester. While it is too early to determine if this course was effective from a retention standpoint, anecdotal information suggests a substantial reduction in the number of students transferring out of chemical engineering this year (so far) relative to last year. Introduction and Motivation Students enter into chemical engineering (and STEM disciplines, in general) for a wide-variety of reasons: they like science, are good at math, want to make good money, have a parent who works in a STEM field, etc. Invariably, a percentage of these students do not sustain to graduate in the discipline they declared upon entering college. While in some circumstances the reasons for this can be considered reasonable (re: really wanted to be an English or a business major), in other situations the explanations provided for dropping from a particular curriculum are, at best, illinformed (re: must work in an office all day). The later issue is a major problem since it is often a difficult task to “educate” a student on all that STEM (or, in this case, chemical engineering) has to offer after they have made the decision to switch majors. In the Fall of 2004, the Chemical Engineering Department at Tennessee Technological University had eight of 30 chemical engineering freshman students drop out of chemical engineering. While this percentage may or may not be alarming, subsequent “exit” interviews with one of us revealed that several of the students were leaving for reasons that can only be described as “ill-informed”. Comments ranged from “I want to do biochemical engineering and think that a B.S. in biology would be better” to “I don’t want to build robots”. Clearly, there was a misinformation problem with these students and, therefore, misconceptions among students developed. And, as engineering educators, we know that if a few students have an idea (correct or otherwise) about a certain issue, it is likely that many in that cohort are “non-verbal” carriers of this information. This incorrect piece of information could be the deciding issue for a student whose knowledge or choice of the discipline is not well-grounded. Since chemical engineering students at Tennessee Tech do not take a chemical engineering course until their sophomore year, there was no formal way to address these issues and remove misconceptions. Note that an “Underclassman Information Session” developed for Spring of 2005 (with pizza included) attracted only 3 students and, thus, more effective measures were required. Our approach was to take the broader generalizations outlined for students leaving STEM Majors by Seymour and Hewitt 1 , and address those while, at the same time, gathering information on our students and assessing the impact of this intervention. The purpose of this article is to discuss this approach at Tennessee Tech. All Engineering students at Tennessee Tech take a one-credit Introduction to Engineering course. This multi-disciplinary course is held in a large lecture hall with a class size normally exceeding 100 students. The course focuses on introducing students to the profession through topic lectures, videos and a capstone project (normally something mechanical in nature). After analysis of the topics and via discussions with chemical engineering students who have taken this class, it was clear that certain important pieces of information, including things specific to chemical engineering students, were never being discussed or even conveyed. Hence, the next logical step was to generate a separate class, Introduction to Chemical Engineering, which was to be required of all entering chemical engineering freshman. Note that this course, labeled ChE 1010, is currently not a substitute to the Introduction to Engineering course, but rather a second, complementary course. Now that the idea for ChE 1010, Introduction to Chemical Engineering, had been developed, the course content would need to be decided. Since students were going to be the users of this class, we decided to inform all of our undergraduates (via email) that this course was in the planning stage and we would like their suggestions on what to include. The main thing emphasized was the issue “What did you wish you knew about chemical cngineering, the discipline, the department, the university, etc. when you started that you now know...and, also, is there anything you still do not know but would like to know?” Also, a focus group of about 15 sophomore students was chosen to provide more direct feedback on this issue. Once we had this information, it was discussed at a general faculty meeting with the use of literature on this subject 2,3 (most notably from NJIT) 4 as a reference. At the end of several iterations, a syllabus was designed.