The project is a collaborative effort between investigators at Arizona State University and Purdue University at Fort Wayne. Responding to the unprecedented economic challenges, the engineering college at Arizona State University is restructuring its first-year engineering experience in a way that also attempts to improve persistence rates, study strategies, and student perceptions of engineering as a profession, especially with regard to underrepresented student populations. To achieve these goals, they are implementing an engineering education camp -- an intervention designed to encourage collaboration and to teach students to value mastery and success in solving problems rather than outshining their peers. In addition, selected engineering faculty members are participating in faculty training workshops and are working together to create an interactive, engaging learning experience for their students. The collaborating investigators are using a quasi-experimental study design to compare data on these students with existing longitudinal data from an on-going NSF project to determine if the intervention has an effect on student motivation and learning strategies. The analysis includes cross sectional independent samples comparisons between new and old cohorts, interviews and observations of engineering instructors and their classrooms, and examination of differences in population trajectories between treatment and comparison groups.
