The IMPULSE instructors pointed to three concerns that motivated them to consider making improvements in their engineering program:

1. high attrition rate,

2. weak student engagement, and

3. poor student performance.

1. High Attrition Rate
In spite of university services like tutoring, withdrawal and failure rates were fairly high for students seeking to major in engineering at UMD. As in many other engineering programs, students were required to take several semesters of calculus, physics and chemistry as pre-requisites to the first engineering courses. In calculus courses at UMD, attrition rates were in the 40 percent range, while in chemistry courses they ranged up to 52 percent. High rates of attrition in these courses meant that many students left before being exposed to a single engineering course (see Figure 1)^a. Their short experience with the pre-engineering curriculum left them bitter and discouraged about science and engineering^b.

Figure 1
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Of note, many of the students who left the engineering program had entered with high SAT scores--which are viewed as predictors of success in engineering programs (Figure 2). Moreover, these students did not switch to science majors^c. According to Nick Pendergrass (electrical engineering), the faculty who eventually developed IMPULSE were distressed that many faculty in the UMD College of Engineering--like those in many other engineering programs--viewed these high attrition rates as a sign of their rigor. The IMPULSE instructors, by contrast, did not believe that high attrition rates were simply a sign of the program's success and rigor. They felt compelled to investigate the reasons why students were dropping out^d.

Figure 2
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2. Weak Student Engagement
While retention was the primary challenge that motivated faculty to implement IMPULSE at UMD, they also identified student engagement as an impediment to an effective learning environment^e. Many students' only motivation for taking the basic foundation courses was to fulfill requirements--a motivation that often led to disastrous performance on tests, even for the best-prepared students^f. This lack of motivation occurred even when caring instructors tried using grades as an incentive to encourage participation and engagement^g.

Nick Pendergrass described the problem in terms of students' complaints about the curriculum and, in particular, about the ways the pre-requisite, or foundation, science and math courses were taught^h. Students, he explained, felt that these courses offered only a complex display of mathematics and science concepts and did not offer any linkages to applications. They saw no connection between the content of these courses and real life problems faced by engineers in the workplaceⁱ. Even an attempt by faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department to create a hands-on technology course was unsuccessful in addressing the problem.

In the past, science and engineering instructors taught basic concepts using simple canonical models, promising students that they would later recognize and experience their applicability and usefulness in the real world, if not during their university studies. For two reasons, this does not work well for most of today's students, according to Renate Crawford (physics). First, today's students firmly believe that the world in which they live is totally different from that described in physics and math courses. Second, they are much less inclined to take their instructors' word for it; they require tangible evidence that the concepts they are asked to learn--particularly in their prerequisite courses in physics and math--will be useful to them as engineers and also will relate meaningfully to their own experience^j.

3. Student Performance

Weak student performance was another concern at UMD, particularly in physics and math courses where engineering students' motivation and interest were noticeably low, but also in the engineering courses. The poor performance of the engineering students was also evident in the physics Force Concept Inventory (FCI) test³. The FCI is a multiple-choice test designed to assess the understanding of basic concepts in Newtonian physics. Recently, it has become one of the popular methods for assessing the effectiveness of physics instruction. The UMD students scored at 20 in the percent gain figure on the FCI test, a score comparable to typical traditional courses, but significantly lower than classrooms that had implemented active learning. Renate Crawford, a physics instructor explained:

This is why we are interested in active learning (pointing to the pink data points on Figure 3). We're right there...where you'd expect for the lecture courses-- the lecture courses have very little gain, about twenty percent. So, while we weren't any worse than anybody else, we were pretty pitiful. The gains achieved by students in these active learning courses are more significant.

Renate also related students' performance to an apparent lack of engagement (see "problem 2" above) that, in turn, she linked to the traditional lecture-based classroom. She remembered that, as a student herself,

it can be incredibly boring, no matter how interesting the subject matter may be, to just sit there for 50 minutes or 90 minutes and just listen. And a lot of times it would happen that while you [as a student] are writing something down, the professor is talking about the next subject. So you never actively participated.

She recalled this when, as a professor herself, she began using lectures and observed that although her students wrote down her words, the meaning "didn't go through their brain."

Bob Kowalczyk (mathematics) saw that this kind of faculty dissatisfaction with student performance was a good reason to start considering other approaches: "Engineering had a pretty high dropout rate, and the students who made it through were doing okay, but not as well as we would expect. So this gave us a chance to look for other pedagogical techniques that could help us retain the students as well as do a better job teaching them."

B. Goals

The UMD instructors explained that, to address their concerns about student learning^k, they settled on a set of key strategies that are supported by evidence from around the country and that they believed would enable them to:

• understand the reasons for poor retention, so that they could change the critical problematic factors,

• help students understand why the foundation courses are important to success in engineering majors and future engineering careers,

• help students relate the foundation courses to their own current experiences, and

• provide learning experiences that are engaging and active and that result in greater gains in student understanding.

Their key strategies were to design a learning environment that incorporates the following elements:

• integration of math, physics and engineering,

• technology that supports conceptual and skill-based learning,

• application of principles to novel situations, and

• collaborative learning

See Discussion 2, "Making the connections: A discussion of the key principles used in the IMPULSE program," for the instructors' reasons for choosing these strategies to achieve their goals for improving student learning."