Integrating Technology, English, and Communication Courses for First-Year Technology Students

This work in progress describes a large-scale, inter-departmental course integration for first-year Technology majors. Undergraduate student experience during the first year has been linked to success throughout college. The current work-in-progress extends existing research regarding the first-year experience by documenting the implementation and effects of a large-scale first-year course integration. This Integrated First-Year Experience is a new large-scale course integration being implemented at a large public research university. Large-scale integration on this level is an intervention in the traditional university model, which often times includes a heavy, discipline-based segmentation of coursework. In this new arrangement, students in an introductory Technology course are enrolled together in either an introductory Communication course or an introductory English composition course. This article reports on the establishment of this course integration, including our efforts to document and analyze the experience. The article begins to explore what differences this arrangement of courses has made for students and instructors, with a focus toward if and how their formal integration may improve students’ learning, academic engagement, and sense of community. Introduction First-year undergraduate experience, both social and academic, has been strongly linked to success throughout students’ subsequent college years. As a result, many institutions have attempted to improve retention and persistence among their student bodies by implementing a variety of programs aimed at improving the first-year experience. Common means of increasing student engagement and persistence in the first year of undergraduate education include first-year seminars and other programs, residential or academic learning communities, and course integration. Though these methods of managing and enhancing first-year undergraduate experience in general have been researched, large-scale partnered-teaching efforts that span more than one institutional department are relatively uncommon in the context of large public research universities. Purdue Polytechnic, in conjunction with the Departments of English and Communication at Purdue University, has implemented a new Integrated First-Year Experience among 3 introductory freshman courses—Introductory Composition, Fundamentals of Speech Communication, and Design Thinking in Technology. In total, the integration involved over 500 first-year students, 34 instructors, and 3 departments across the university; the integration emphasizes intersections between humanities and STEM disciplines and provide an “integrated, holistic approach to coursework,” “innovative learning environments,” and “a context-rich application of English, Communications and Technology” . Specifically, this project aims to improve students’ writing skills, oral communication skills, and presentation skills by reinforcing the importance of these skills in realistic, project-based design contexts. Administrators and instructors within all 3 departments hope the integration will improve students’ learning in all disciplines, increase academic engagement overall, and create a stronger sense of community among students. Large-scale integration on this level is an intervention in the traditional university model, which often times includes strict discipline-based divisions of coursework. In this new arrangement, students in each integrated introductory Technology class are also enrolled in either an introductory Communication course or an introductory English course. Administrators from each department worked to develop initial outlines and structures that would facilitate curricular overlap and connection across each trio of classes. Scheduling and classroom spaces were arranged so that each pair of courses (Technology and English, or Technology and Communication) would meet consecutively once per week in the same shared classroom space. Instructors in each “trio” of courses were encouraged to collaboratively explore and implement effective ways of reinforcing and integrating concepts and curriculum from the course they were paired with in their own courses. This article reports on the establishment of this course integration and begins to explore not only how instructors approached these teaching opportunities, but also what differences their efforts made. We focus on both how this project affected students and instructors, and pay special attention to if and how the formal integration of these courses improves students’ learning, academic engagement, and sense of community. What follows is a brief overview of existing research; some detailed documentation of the motivation, history, and timeline of the Integrated First-Year Experience; preliminary discussion about the project’s research agenda, limitations, and current status; and a brief view of the project’s future development. Existing Research on First-Year Undergraduate Experience First-year seminar programs, residential and academic learning communities, and course integration efforts have been studied and implemented at various levels within educational institutions around the world. Many factors underlying student success in the first-year, including measures of collaborative learning and connectedness, the importance of self-efficacy and optimism, the role of social support, 5 and the construction of student communities, are present in existing literature. Some institutions require students to enroll in courses meant to help them adjust to college life: low-credit academic skills courses, First-Year Seminars, orientations, or other similar courses. Enke cited a National Survey of First-Year Seminars from 2006, which reported that campuses with these types of First-Year programs tend to see “increased satisfaction with faculty and the institution, improved retention to the sophomore year and persistence to graduation, increased involvement in campus activities and use of campus services, increased out-of-class student/faculty interaction, and improved academic ability and grade point average” (p. 78). Learning communities are another way academic institutions attempt (with mixed results) to foster community and engagement, with hopes of improving retention and persistence among students. Smith 6 traced connectedness among residential learning communities. Recent research on classroom integration within STEM fields, especially in K-12 settings, indicates that course integration within STEM disciplines—e.g. integrating math/engineering, science/math, or technology/science— has potential for improving learning in both subjects. Within engineering education specifically, attempts have also been made to reinforce the first-year experience for students. Dym et al. described and evaluated how the core principles of engineering and design are often taught via project-based learning. These authors note an increase in “corner-stone (design) courses”—foundational, introductory courses, analogous to more traditional “capstone” courses, but specifically geared toward first-year students—and observe that these corner-stone courses have been “motivated by an awareness of the curricular disconnect with first-year students who often did not see any engineering faculty for most of their first two years of study” (p. 103). Efforts to re-envision engineering programs and integrate core principles of engineering and design more consistently throughout students’ undergraduate careers aim to improve and make engineering education more effective overall, but may not always succeed. Often such efforts are highly demanding in terms of logistical planning, institutional support, and instructor commitment, as Hirsch et al. recognized. Combining resources across colleges or schools provides great opportunities for interdisciplinary, crosscollege instruction, but also comes with complexities and potential costs. Not unexpectedly Honey, Pearson & Schweingruber’s findings and discussion “suggest that integration can lead to improved conceptual learning in the disciplines but that the effects differ, depending on the nature of the integration, the outcomes measured, and the students’ prior knowledge and experience” (p. 52). The STEM integration report also acknowledged that “very little is known about how to organize curriculum and instruction so that emerging knowledge in different disciplines will mesh smoothly and at the right time to yield the kind of integration that supports coherent learning” and importantly warned, “the danger is that one or more of the ‘integrated’ disciplines will receive short shrift in its development” (p. 53). Early in the development of this Integrated First-Year Experience, administrators admitted concern about the potential limitations of isolating students within the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. Students enrolled in the integrated sections could miss out on interactions with students outside their college/field. Additionally, as the preliminary results indicate below, some instructors also feared the imbalances Honey, Pearson & Schweingruber discussed. The current project extends first-year experience research with a focus on interdisciplinary course integration. Our Integrated First-Year Experience is not a learning community or an “extra” introductory college skills class. Nor is this program merely interested in integration within STEM fields, but rather a concerted effort among three separate university departments to tie essential skills and concepts from the humanities, along with skills and concepts important to STEM fields, to realistic global problems and contexts. Background and Logistics At this public research institution, the introductory Communication course and the introductory English course are required of nearly all students. The introductory Technology course is required of every first-year student within the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. For this new co