Work in progress-findings of the pilot offering of an application oriented course (ENGR 101)

Students' inability to easily apply concepts of mathematics to engineering problems and applications is detrimental to their success in pursuing an engineering degree. It has a direct impact on the retention and graduation numbers in engineering colleges. In addition, high failure rate in first year mathematics courses is also hurting students' chances to make satisfactory progress towards their degree and ultimately graduate within even six years. In order to address these serious issues, in Fall of 2016, New Jersey Institute of Technology offered ENGR 101- A n application oriented course based on Wright State University model to engineering students placed in pre-calculus courses. Although only one year worth of data has been collected thus far and there is much to be studied and analyzed on the effectiveness of the course, we can already see that this experiment has produced encouraging results and students taking this course performed better in their pre-calculus courses compared to students who did not take ENGR 101. This paper will present the results of our analysis, including performance in the mathematics course while taking ENGR 101 simultaneously, and performance in the mathematics course in the subsequent semester. With the lessons learned from last year, a few additions and changes will be made for Fall 2017.