Shawna Thomas, Randy Brooks, Robert Lightfoot,
ASEE Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference, March 2022.
Abstract: Before the first day of class, both students and faculty experience uncertainty and anxiety about the journey that lays ahead. Faculty have certain expectations about what students know coming into the course, the students’ academic and life experiences, and even the students’ study habits. Students likewise have expectations about what support the faculty will provide, concerns about the challenges in the course based on their own previous experiences or intel from other students, and the students’ ability to manage their course/life load.
A simple pre-course or first-day survey is a powerful tool to expose student backgrounds, training, and concerns to the faculty. Faculty in turn can swiftly and accordingly tailor the beginning weeks of the course and supplementary material, identify social and emotional states, reduce student anxiety, and begin to develop a rapport with their students as they support an inclusive classroom community.
In this paper we share best practices for facilitating pre-course and first-day surveys which can be applied to any discipline and at all academic levels. We discuss specific ways to leverage the information gathered in these surveys for course launch, providing one-on-one care even in large classes, and fostering community.
For example, a common question is to ask if the student has any concerns or issues that the faculty should be aware of. Themes often emerge that the faculty can address to the entire class, supporting even those students who did not directly vocalize the concern. In addition, faculty can send a personalized email to students with concerns about specific ways to alleviate them. Student response to this approach is overwhelmingly positive, especially in large classes where students typically feel unseen and unheard. This sets a tone of caring as, historically, faculty do not often ask their students about their general concerns or issues.
Another way to use these surveys is to identify gaps in student knowledge that need to be addressed. The faculty can then add targeted supplemental activities and make adjustments to other supports addressing the specific needs of the students in a given semester. Faculty may also include leading questions to spur student development and target thinking. Finally, faculty can create student working groups that more evenly distribute background knowledge and skill sets. This fosters a collaborative environment where students are encouraged to lean on each other as they build their knowledge and skills.
We present observations from deploying these surveys in several different courses including a first-year engineering course, a junior-level project-based computer science and engineering course, and a senior capstone design course. Impact demonstration will be in the form of specific applications where the authors used survey results to best design teams, build connections within and across the student community, and to determine the level of scaffolding needed to address survey-identified student knowledge and skill set challenges.
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