Evolution of Cornerstone: Creating a First-year Culture with a Multifaceted Approach

Whalen Teaching MA and Associate Director of First-year Engineering. The mission of the First-year Engineering team is to provide a reliable, wide-ranging, and constructive educational experience that endorses the student-centered and professionally-oriented mission of the University. He also teaches specialty courses in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern and has published and presented papers on approaches and techniques in engineering education. He Outstanding Teaching Northeastern and numerous Best Paper and Best Presentation with fellow First-year faculty coauthors ASEE. Abstract This complete evidence-based practice paper presents an update of analysis and observations in a required first-year engineering curriculum at Northeastern University, which is a medium-sized, private, urban university. A curricula redesign resulted in a “cornerstone to capstone” approach with a pilot program rolled out to 2 sections of a first-year engineering course in the Fall of 2014. The goal of this cornerstone approach was to integrate design, programming, graphical communication, and engineering analysis previously taught in two separate first-year engineering courses by creating an 8 credit hour, 14 week course that focuses on real world, hands-on design projects. Now in its third year of continued refinement and analysis, the University is offering 5 sections of the 8 credit hour course (Full Cornerstone) and 20 sections of a version with 2 separate 4 credit hour courses (Split Cornerstone) that run over the fall and spring semester. Each section is populated with approximately 30 first-year students from a total first-year class size exceeding 700 students. With two versions implemented over the past two years, there has been enough redesign to warrant more discussion. The course redesign has been driven by feedback and evidence, fundamentally following the design process we teach in the course. The data used to drive this redesign has come from four sources: 1) a survey of students in both the cornerstone and non-cornerstone (original 2 course sequence) sections on many topics covering textbooks, pedagogy, concepts taught, self-efficacy in engineering, and more; 2) student feedback teams used in many sections of the course; 3) University-administered student evaluations given at the end of each semester; and 4) the first-year teaching team, which met frequently and worked each summer to improve course design and supporting materials. This paper outlines the differences between the Full versus Split Cornerstone approaches and looks at the evolution of a first year culture and other positive effects created in instituting the new Cornerstone courses. The analysis includes how both the students and instructors are affected by each approach and the lessons learned along the way to make both Cornerstone approaches successful. A description of various projects and themes used to create the project based courses is included. Overall results show that the Cornerstone approach is successful and has created a positive student culture centered on the projects and the learning center where students work. Students have seen a positive improvement in their perspectives on engineering and self-efficacy in their abilities to become an engineer.