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Work in Progress: Institutional Context and the Implementation of the Redshirt in Engineering Model at Six Universities

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

First-year Programs Division Postcard Session 1: Retention and Student Success Strategies

Tagged Division

First-Year Programs

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

19

DOI

10.18260/1-2--31292

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/31292

Download Count

420

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Paper Authors

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Emily Knaphus-Soran University of Washington

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Emily Knaphus-Soran is a Research Associate at the Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity (CERSE) at the University of Washington. She works on the evaluation of several projects aimed at improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM fields. She also conducts research on the social-psychological and institutional forces that contribute to the persistence of race and class inequalities in the United States. Emily earned a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of Washington, and a BA in Sociology from Smith College.

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Ann Delaney Boise State University

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Ann Delaney graduated in 2016 with her Masters in Materials Science & Engineering with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Public Policy and Administration from Boise State University. Her thesis was entitled, "Nanomanufacturing Outside of the Lab: An Academic-Industry Partnership Case Study.” She also received her B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from Boise State in 2014. In the Spring of 2016, Ann was recognized as part of the first cohort of University Innovation Fellows at Boise State, and has worked as a Fellow to collect and incorporate student feedback into future plans for makerspaces on the Boise State campus. As an undergraduate and graduate student, she has been involved with the Society of Women Engineers, and also taught a materials science laboratory course as a graduate teaching assistant. She has volunteered at numerous STEM outreach activities on and off of the Boise State campus throughout her time as a student and is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and helping girls and women to recognize that STEM is a path that is open to them if they want to take it.

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Katherine Christine Tetrick Washington State University

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Katherine directs the Washington STate Academic RedShirt (STARS) program at Washington State University. She holds a Master of Science in Mathematics with a Teaching Emphasis.

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Sonya Cunningham University of Washington

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Director, STARS Program
Diversity & Access
College of Engineering

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Pamela Cosman University of California, San Diego Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4012-0176

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Pamela C. Cosman received the B.S. degree with Honor in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1993. In 1995 she joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, and is currently a Professor. She has published over 250 journal and conference papers in the areas of image/video compression and processing and wireless communications. She served as Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (2006-2008), Associate Dean for Students of the Jacobs School of Engineering (2013-2016), and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2006-2009). Her awards include the 2016 UC San Diego Affirmative Action and Diversity Award, and the 2017 Athena Pinnacle Award (Individual in Education). She is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

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Tanya D. Ennis University of Colorado, Boulder

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TANYA D. ENNIS is the current Engineering GoldShirt Program Director at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. She received her M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her career in the telecommunications industry included positions in software and systems engineering and technical project management. Tanya taught mathematics at the Denver School of Science and Technology, the highest performing high school in Denver Public Schools. She is a PhD student in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder studying Learning Sciences and Human Development.

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Beth A. Myers University of Colorado, Boulder

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Beth A. Myers is the Director of Analytics, Assessment and Accreditation at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a BA in biochemistry, ME in engineering management and PhD in civil engineering. Her interests are in quantitative and qualitative research and data analysis as related to equity in education.

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Jana Milford University of Colorado, Boulder

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Jana B. Milford is professor of mechanical engineering and faculty advisor for the Engineering GoldShirt Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and a J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law. Her research and teaching focus on atmospheric chemistry and transport modeling and air quality management.

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Donna C. Llewellyn Boise State University

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Donna Crystal Llewellyn received her BA (major in Mathematics and minor in Economics) with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1980. She went on to earn an MS in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1984. After 30 years at Georgia Tech in a variety of roles, Donna became the Executive Director of the new Institute for STEM and Diversity Initiatives at Boise State University in January 2015. Donna's current interests center around education issues in general, and in particular on increasing access and success of those traditionally under-represented and/or under-served in STEM higher education.

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Eve A. Riskin University of Washington

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Eve Riskin received her BS degree in Electrical Engineering from
M.I.T. and her graduate degrees in EE from Stanford. Since 1990, she
has been in the EE Department at the University of Washington where
she is now Associate Dean of Diversity and Access in the College of
Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the
ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change. With ADVANCE, she works on
mentoring and leadership development programs for women faculty in
SEM. Her research interests include image compression and image
processing, with a focus on developing video compression algorithms to
allow for cell-phone transmission of American Sign Language. She was
awarded a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a
Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2006 WEPAN University Change Agent
award, the 2006 Hewlett-Packard Harriett B. Rigas Award, and the 2007
University of Washington David B. Thorud Leadership Award.
She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

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Janet Callahan Boise State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6665-1584

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Janet Callahan is Chair and Professor of the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University. Dr. Callahan received her Ph.D. in Materials Science, M.S. in Metallurgy, and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut. Her educational research interests include retention, mathematics and materials science teaching and learning, first-year programs, accreditation, and faculty development.

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Kevin Pitts University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Professor of Physics

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Michelle Ferrez University of California, San Diego

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Michelle is currently the Director of the IDEA Engineering Student Center at UC San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering (Inclusion-Diversity-Excellence-Achievement). Dr. Ferrez has twenty three years of experience on diversity in STEM access, retention, and success programs in higher education (4 year and community colleges), K-12 and graduate student pipeline programs, and the role of four-year minority serving institutions in creating educational equity in STEM. Her primary interest centers on postsecondary success for minoritized women and men in STEM fields. Following this interest, she has conducted research in several areas including the intersectionality of race and gender in engineering; including understanding the culture, climate, and infrastructure of an engineering program (policies, organizational norms, interactions with faculty & peers, etc.) that may reinforce racial and gender stereotypes, engender feelings of racial and gender subordination, and disproportionately validate and privilege members of some racial groups at the expense of others.

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Abstract

Low-income students are underrepresented in engineering and are more likely to struggle in engineering programs. Such students may be academically talented and perform well in high school, but may have relatively weak academic preparation for college compared to students who attended better-resourced schools. Four-year engineering and computer science curricula are designed for students who are calculus-ready, but many students who are eager to become engineers or computer scientists need additional time and support to succeed. The NSF-funded Redshirt in Engineering Consortium was formed in 2016 as a collaborative effort to build on the success of three existing “academic redshirt” programs and expand the model to three new schools. The Consortium takes its name from the practice of redshirting in college athletics, with the idea of providing an extra year and support to promising engineering students from low-income backgrounds. The goal of the program is to enhance the students’ ability to successfully graduate with engineering or computer science degrees. This Work in Progress paper describes the redshirt programs at each of the six Consortium institutions, providing a variety of models for how an extra preparatory year or other intensive academic preparatory programs can be accommodated. This paper will pay particular attention to the ways that institutional context shapes the implementation of the redshirt model. For instance, what do the redshirt admissions and selection processes look like at schools with direct-to-college admissions versus schools with post-general education admissions? What substantive elements of the first-year curriculum are consistent across the consortium? Where variation in curriculum occurs, what are the institutional factors that produce this variation? How does the redshirt program fit with other pre-existing academic support services on campus, and what impact does this have on the redshirt program’s areas of focus? Program elements covered include first-year curricula, pre-matriculation summer programs, academic advising and support services, admissions and selection processes, and financial aid. Ongoing assessment efforts and research designed to investigate how the various redshirt models influence faculty and student experiences will be described.

Knaphus-Soran, E., & Delaney, A., & Tetrick, K. C., & Cunningham, S., & Cosman, P., & Ennis, T. D., & Myers, B. A., & Milford, J., & Llewellyn, D. C., & Riskin, E. A., & Callahan, J., & Pitts, K., & Ferrez, M. (2018, June), Work in Progress: Institutional Context and the Implementation of the Redshirt in Engineering Model at Six Universities Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--31292

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2018 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015