University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 31, 2002

By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor

Engineering students tend to be driven and tenacious people, according to William Wild, director of the Student Excellence Initiative in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). And they need to be—the demands of the curriculum are daunting, to say the least.

While SEAS students are slaving away four or more hours a night over homework, they often wonder why everyone else in the residence hall has a weekend that begins on Thursday night, says Wild. "They don't get what's happening to them. There's this 'what is happening to me effect,'" Wild says of the intense transitional changes required of engineering students. "Our freshman is trying to understand physics or chemistry, and everyone is looking at him or her like they have a problem."

The Student Excellence Initiative was developed by Wild, under the supervision of Michael Ryan, professor of chemical engineering and associate dean for undergraduate education, to help engineering students understand everything they're going through—to understand why those "As" and "Bs" aren't coming as easily as they did in high school and to help them make the significant transition mentally, emotionally and intellectually that's expected of them.

"It's about helping them understand what the light at end of the tunnel is supposed to be about," says Wild, "and also lets them know someone cares," while they undergo this major cognitive shift.

Now in its fourth year, the Student Excellence Initiative is continually being refined as it gains attention, both statewide and nationally, for its multi-pronged and extraordinarily comprehensive approach to helping students meet the needs of a difficult curriculum and improve retention in a program that traditionally has suffered from high drop-out rates.

Until the initiative began at UB, Wild admits that engineering faculty and staff had very little idea about what their students were going through. This was due, in part, to a curriculum that is spread across multiple departments outside the school—such Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics—which meant that engineering professors often weren't making contact with students until their third and fourth years of the program. Thus, the image and myth of the engineering student climbing a steep mountain with little or no assistance prevailed.

"The traditional image is that students are brought in, they're thrown up against the wall and whoever doesn't fall off at the end of the four years is an engineer. To the extent that this is true, it's not good. To the extent that it's even believed, it's not good," says Wild.

"In the past, there was little direct dialogue between engineering and the service departments beyond matters of logistics. As a result, we were largely disassociated from the freshman engineer's learning experience," he explains.

The overall goal of the initiative, according to Wild, is to ensure success for every student enrolled in the program. And while that's the goal of many student success programs, the SEAS approach is to begin at the beginning—before admission—to better identify students who are likely to be successful in the engineering program. The students then are paired with mentors and provided linkages to career guidance and counseling, counseled in time management and study skills, and encouraged to enroll in small study groups.

"Small groups are for first year courses only, with the idea that after that, students will go on to apply the skills they've acquired there. If we continue the small groups too long, they would become a crutch," says Wild.

The SEAS initiative goes far beyond just being an academic band-aid to student achievement. The idea is to give students the tools to make the huge cognitive transition that is expected of them, says Wild, and in order to do that, SEAS has had to examine how it delivers its services—the overall educational process—to the students, from the bottom up.

Wild has developed the Seven Threshold Model, which looks at SAT scores, high school averages and Regents exam scores in chemistry, math (courses I through III) and physics as a predictor of student success and to identify underprepared students at the outset. By developing a composite picture of students' high school work based on an analysis of their scores across courses that are foundational for college level work, Wild says he can identify, with a high degree of probability, many prospective students who are not going to make it through the engineering program.

"Seventy-five percent of leavers were in academic difficulty from the start, with underpreparation the dominant cause," says Wild. The consequences to the student of failure in the program, he points out, often are a shattered self-image, an academic record that's permanently damaged and a significant financial investment that's now lost.

"Academic failure is not cost free; they don't let go easily," Wild says of students who don't make it. "The person gets significantly damaged and leaves (the program) kind of broken. If you watch the damage, it's not a better thing to have given them a shot if their chances were remote to begin with."

"The crux of the problem is that the students are coming in with deeply unrealistic expectations. Everyone came in here with 90 averages and cannot fathom how they can get a 50 on a first chemistry test. They cannot fathom how only 30 percent of them will have B's at the end of the first year. All the speeches in the world won't matter—you're just hoping to be there when they run into trouble," says Wild.

The success of the initiative can be measured in a variety of ways. Students give it high marks in survey after survey, and the number of faculty members across departments who have volunteered their time with little to no recognition other than the personal knowledge that they're making a difference in student's lives is staggering. Wild counts at least 50 faculty members who are mentoring students. They are critical to the success of the initiative, he says.

A sizeable number of non-engineering faculty are also involved in the program says Wild. "We now meet regularly with department chairs, undergraduate directors and course instructors in chemistry, math and physics; we share developments in our respective initiatives, discuss student learning issues, course designs and pedagogy, and mutually reinforce each others' support efforts," Wild explains.

"We're challenging and changing the historical image of engineering. We're looking to recast the underclass experience," he says, adding that he tells students the aim is not to get into an engineering school; the aim is to get out of one, successfully. But, he emphasizes, "If you're going to have a tolerance for pain, you need a reason to go through it."

The small study groups, which are managed by Wild and Richard Dutton, Wild's teaching partner, a key member of the initiative and a lecturer, are where, Wild says, the academic "heavy lifting" takes place. The success of the groups is born out in students' assessment of their participation in them.

According to Wild, student evaluations of the small groups are overwhelmingly positive in terms of helping them better understand course material and how to study in general. Additionally, 54-65 percent of participants also estimate an increase of a letter grade or more as a result of participation in the groups.

Each year since the initiative began in 1999, positive ratings and the number of students participating in small groups have continued to climb. The data compiled by Wild also suggests that students who participate in study groups outperform their peers by about one letter grade.

The small groups are open to all engineering students—participation is voluntary—and offered for one hour each week in chemistry, calculus and physics. The classes offer a 10:1 student/teacher ratio, with a student tutor assisting. The groups, say Wild, help students find a home in SEAS and give them a sense of belonging and motivation, besides helping them to better understand the course material and how to approach engineering problems.

Another component of the initiative is Opening Day—which Wild says is not just an information session or a one-time party, but a preemptive strike against isolation.

"Opening Day initiates a sense of belonging—it helps students break the ice," says Wild, adding that it also is where students meet their mentors—another "early warning system" that's put into place from the beginning. Students perceptions about the mentoring relationship established at Opening Day are by and large positive—what's important to them, according to Wild, is the fact that they're mentored by "someone who cares with wisdom."

Opening Day isn't all business—students must design a kite in teams that will fly sans wind (Opening Day takes place inside Alumni Arena) and they are treated to pizza. Wild hopes that when students reflect on their time as part of SEAS, they'll remember Opening Day and how it set the tone for their overall experience and future success. "Did you meet anyone? Has it made a difference?" are questions students are asked at the end of their first semester. "Thus far the responses have been 70-80 percent in the affirmative," says Wild.

One of the most crucial—and perhaps challenging—aspects of the initiative is the cross-departmental effort to develop a consistent learning experience across curriculum. Developing core competencies for each course will ensure that students are prepared adequately for upper-level courses because the set of skills or problems to be mastered are defined at the outset. Curriculum is tailored to address those requirements, which means spelling out the minimum level of preparation that students are expected to receive and providing consistency in the design of instructional materials and exams used to teach and test those competencies.

"We're working on strengthening the consistency of the learning experience," explains Wild.

SEAS also is revising its "Case Studies in Engineering" course to give students a more accurate picture of engineering, enhance motivation and help inform career decision-making. "We want to get them involved in engineering case studies and with exploring their own personal connection to, and goals within, to whether or not they are the ones who want to be in engineering—we try to change the locus of control from what the job market may want, to what they want," says Wild. The purpose, he adds, is "to help them find a home; if not in engineering, then to help them go someplace else. Another way the initiative helps students map out their careers, whether or not they stay in engineering, is to connect them in small groups with specially tailored workshops offered by staff from the offices of Career Planning and Placement in tandem with University Advisement.

In the event that a student must leave SEAS, the shock and difficulty in making the transition is lessened, says Wild, because of the initiative's focus on the overall student experience in SEAS, especially during that crucial first year. If a student falls behind the first year, it's virtually impossible to catch up.

"There is very little forgiveness in the curriculum," explains Wild. "The cliff is pretty steep. Each course depends on the courses that precede it, so if the first building blocks are not in place, everything thereafter tumbles—and so if you don't catch the train at the beginning—the train is gone."

The Student Excellence Initiative is gaining notice—this past June a paper on the initiative authored by Wild and Ryan won second place at the annual American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in the Freshman Programs Division. A similar presentation earlier in the spring garnered first place as the "Best Presentation by a University Center" at the New York State Faculty Senate Student Retention Symposium. None of this would have been possible, say Wild and Ryan, without the enthusiastic support of SEAS Dean Mark Karwan.

Both Wild and Ryan want to make sure students come away with the feeling that someone was there for them, that someone cared about what they were going through, and that they built satisfying and mutually beneficial relationships with peers and SEAS faculty.

While tightening admission standards has enabled SEAS to give those who enter the school more personalized attention, Wild adds that the point of the initiative is that "everybody who comes in has a fair chance of success."