Spring 2020 – Improving Student Experiences to Increase Student Engagement (ISE-2)

Improving Student Experiences to Increase Student Engagement” (ISE-2) was awarded to Texas A&M University by the National Science Foundation, through EEC-Engineering Diversity Activities. ISE-2 is a faculty development program focused on reducing implicit bias and increasing active learning, with the goals of (a) increasing student engagement, success, and retention, and (b) ultimately seeing greater increases for underrepresented minority (URM), women, and first-generation students. Ten faculty teaching first- and second-year Engineering courses participated in the first cohort of ISE-2 in Summer 2017, which consisted of three workshops and six informal “coffee conversations”. At the conclusion of the workshops, each faculty was tasked with completing a teaching plan for the Fall 2017 semester, to incorporate the strategies and knowledge from ISE-2 into the courses they plan to teach. Focus groups with the ISE-2 faculty were conducted in Fall 2017 to obtain feedback about the faculty development program. Classroom observations were conducted using environmental scans and the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) to assess the classroom climate of faculty in the experimental (ISE-2) and control groups. Student surveys were also administered to students who were taught by ISE-2 faculty and control group faculty to assess student engagement and classroom climate. In the Fall 2018 semester, undergraduate students will work with both quantitative data and qualitative data collected from the ISE-2 project. On the qualitative side, the students will assist in the analysis of environmental scans of classroom observations, COPUS coding of classroom observations, focus group transcripts, teaching plans, and final reflections. On the quantitative side, the students will help with data cleaning and basic analysis for classroom observation student surveys and junior Engineering student surveys