2022 First-Year Engineering Experience

Low Cost—High Impact: Success Skills Students Will Actually Use

Presented at Technical Session S1C

Modern higher education has always struggled with student academic success rates. Despite significant efforts to improve graduations rates, for the past decade they have remained relatively stagnate.
While most institutions have implemented study skill training (both on line and courses) increased tutoring, and other learning resources, graduations rates remain at ~60%. So a fair question is “Do these efforts work?” The answer is yes and no. Yes, the skills work but only if used and used consistently. So for many students the answer is no.
This work presents methodologies grounded in current neuro-science that have been developed in response to this dilemma. These success methodologies are termed Low Cost—High Impact success skills. By design, these success methodologies are low cost to both students and faculty. For students, low cost implies the methods must be very efficient, i.e., easy to learn and implement, rapidly implemented, and have a high rate of learning. High impact is related to effectiveness in learning. The crux of effectiveness is not if a particular method works (it wouldn’t be used if it didn’t work) but whether students will consistently use the method. This crux element—will students use the success skill—is generally overshadowed by how well the method would work if employed.
From a faculty standpoint, low cost consists of a) a small learning curve, b) little disruption to status quo, i.e., readily integrated into any course, c) little to no disruption to faculty’s mode of teaching, and d) a universal design for implementation into any disciplines. High impact refers to student performance including student engagement in class as well as overall performance.
This workshop with develop the key elements of low cost—high impact methods and their distinctive features that make them effective and efficient success skills that student will actually use. The second portion of the workshop participants will work in groups to develop new LC—HI methods or modify common success method such that students will more readily employ them.

Authors

Dr. Peter J. Shull Pennsylvania State University, Altoona Campus [biography]

PETER J. SHULL is Associate Professor of Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. After a successful career in the technical field of Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) and having worked at the Nation Institute of Standards and Technology (the location of the atomic clock used as the United States time standard), Dr. Shull made the decision to return to academia and began his career in education. From the first day, Dr. Shull noted an apparent lack of sound educational practice at the higher educational level. This is reflected in a statement made by Dr. Shull’s Ph.D. advisor regarding teaching—“If you know the material, you’ll be a great teacher!” Recognizing that one’s degree of knowledge of a subject has no relationship to their understanding of pedagogy or their ability to apply it, over the past 18 years, Dr. Shull has maintained an active focus on sound pedagogy as related to STEM education. These efforts have been divided into understanding pedagogical theory and the pragmatic application in the classroom. His primary areas of focus are teaching functional and effective teamwork, how professional skills function as student success skills, and primary factors that influence student success. Much of the work is based in social-emotional development and personal responsibility (inherently difficult areas for most STEM students) and cognitive and metacognitive methods to improve student learning. Additionally, Dr. Shull has maintained a special focus on success of underrepresented engineering students.

Dr. Shull has developed a series of pedagogical workshops designed to educate and train faculty in pragmatic methods to address these issues. He has authored numerous publications in the field of pedagogy, student/professional success factors, and the technical area of NDE including the two popular textbooks Nondestructive Evaluation: Theory, Technique, and Applications (Marcel Dekker, 2001) and X-Ray Imaging Fundamentals, Industrial Techniques and Applications (CRC Press, 2017). He is a Fulbright Scholar (Argentina—2006).

Dr. Shull received his BS degree in mechanical engineering from Bucknell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and performed postdoctoral work at Applied Physic Research laboratory in Gaithersburg, MD.

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