Freshman Faculty Forum-Engineering a Change

A roundtable discussionled by

Professor William J. RiffeManufacturing Engineering

Kettering Universitywriffe@kettering.edu

With strategic and moral support from

Dr. Kenya Ayers

Vice Provost

and

Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs

Organization of the Forum

FreshmanFaculty Forum

Math

Comp Sci

M E I M E

Mgmt

Chem

E C E

Comm

Vision of the Forum

The vision of the Freshman Faculty Forum is to enable students at Kettering University to be successful in their initial year and to create a foundation for academic success.

Mission of the Forum

Our mission is to improve Kettering University’s first year success rate by delineating academic expectations and employing appropriate intervention strategies for all students, whether at-risk or not. Our current first year retention rate is 84%, and our overall retention rate is 65%.

Uniqueness of our Challenge

Kettering University is a five-year close-coupled cooperative education school

85+% of our students are in engineering Engineering courses are begun in the first

year Stringent admissions criteria

Admissions criteria

Topic Minimum PreferredEnglish 6 cr 8 crMath 7 cr 8+ crScience (lab) 4 cr 4+ crAdv Stdg --- yesACT 26 avgSAT 1200 avg

Our Students

Because of the nature of our required cooperative education program, 95+% of our student body is composed of traditional 18-22 year old students

Uniqueness of the Forum

The Freshman Faculty Forum is totally faculty driven. It was conceived by and is populated by faculty.

It reports to the university through the Vice Provost and Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs

It operates in cooperation with the University Retention Committee – KEEP (Kettering Educators Encouraging Persistence)

Faculty concerns

Our concerns can be separated into three classifications:

The student – the raw material

The culture – the environment

The profession – the final product

For student maturity

• They find it hard to relate to classmates, faculty and the University

• They believe the “war stories” told by upperclassmen• They wait until too late to face and resolve problems• They demonstrate increased rudeness and a lack of

respect• They fail to take responsibility for:

• class preparation• study skills• on-time attendance• funds expended on their behalf

For student attitude

• “Layaway Plan of Education”• “I am the only one who counts and you

need to bow to my wishes”• Don’t understand that education is a job.

If you don’t do well, you are let go!

For student preparation

• Difficulty in comprehending written material• Need for reading for life-long learning• Overworked high school teachers – often focused on

meeting state/national testing standards and requirements other than instructional material

• High school rigor is insufficient for many students asuniversity preparation for such a rigorous academic environment

• ACT and SAT are not sufficient indicators for determining academic success – need to evaluate maturity and work ethic

For our societal culture

• TV culture is creating a short attention span – length of class time should not exceed one hour

• Video-game culture is creating long, very focused attention span, even hours at a time

• Effect of this culture on large and small classes is very different

• Inability of student to follow instructions comes from the visual learning (TV generation)

• Want to be entertained rather than educated

For our profession

• Slide-through students could create an engineering disaster later

• Retention does not get financial backing equal to other areas such as research, etc. (we have no intercollegiate sports teams)

• Orientation programs are often more directed at student-student and student-university but not at student-academics

• Students need better advisors and advisor training, not just scheduling advisors

Catalysts for conversation

The Forum is faculty driven. Have you had any similar faculty driven programs on your campus? Let’s discuss their implementation and effectiveness.

What is the comparative success rate of faculty vs. administrative vs. joint programs of retention?

How do you address the “maturity/student development” issues from a faculty perspective? We throw our students into engineering discipline studies in the first term.

In what ways is student attitude a challenge on your campus? What techniques can be used to create an action-oriented positive change?

Catalysts for conversation

How do you organize developmental classes into a program rather than having them stand alone as a class? How do you integrate students taking developmental classes into a regular curriculum—

without stigma?

without long time extension to graduation?

without disrupting the curriculum flow?

Catalysts for conversation

Specific academic concerns

What is the best way to address the lack of math and reading skills demanded of college first year students? What alternatives work and what has been tried and been unsuccessful?

Some of our ideas

pre-curriculum courses within the university

- with professors

- with high school teachers on summer leave

use of community colleges

In our highly technical university, we often believe that our responsibility is to teach the technical subjects and not the developmental ones.

HOW DO WE CHANGE THIS MIND-SET? orMUST WE CHANGE IT?

Specific academic concerns

Writing – The writing proficiency of most students, whether first year or last year, is terrible. Sentence grammar including punctuation, homonym confusion and spelling has been negatively influenced by reliance on computer tools (spell checker) and the informality of the Internet.

Specific academic concerns

How do you get students to be able to write if the curriculum is not geared to “writing across the curriculum” and if the faculty do not put forth the effort of making satisfactory corrections?

An Example – Writing(Eye can two spell)

Roses are read My computer will due it

Violets are blew Sew give me a brake

My spelling is prefect Aye, no eye have maid

And my righting is two Knot won small miss steak

I did a spell cheque

And the words were awl rite

The prays for this peace

Should bee weigh out of site

Source unknowm

Some personal thoughts

I believe that the future of saving first year students is dependent upon the action of faculty and not on administrative dictates. If the faculty do not step up and propose new ideas, plan new programs, and take a vested interest in the first year student, we will continue to lose them at an intolerable rate.

I believe that faculty are the ones closest to the product under construction, the student. As such, we need to spend less time on our own image and more time creating a good self-image for our students.

I believe that professors for first-year classes must have an inner desire and special personality to be able to:

relate more than distance, understand more than judge,

encourage more than condemn, and

listen more than demand.

The Future?

I believe that we, as faculty and administrators on college campuses, have the future in our hands. How we shape that future is the reason we have discussed this situation. The future of our societies, both domestic and foreign, depends upon resolve to meet these concerns head-on.