IUSE/PFE:RED Planning: Multi-Department Culture Change through Common Sophomore Series

This IUSE/PFE: RED Planning project will initiate a transformative cultural shift across all engineering departments at Louisiana Tech University by focusing on a three-course sophomore series as the focus of a RED Track 2 grant in the future. This course sequence offers a multi-departmental coalition a natural and strategic starting point for meaningful change, as it is required for all engineering students, and is taught by faculty across multiple departments. Currently, faculty teach the courses in isolation, and both faculty and students perceive the courses themselves as more relevant to certain disciplines than others, leaving the foundational value of these courses (such as strengthening students' engineering and problem-solving skills, and preparing them to communicate and collaborate effectively across departments and industries in the workforce) underappreciated. This project will develop a plan to empower faculty representatives from every engineering department to enhance and connect the content in these courses; this connection in turn will help students and faculty better understand the purpose and lasting relevance of the shared courses, while embedding cross-departmental faculty will foster lasting collaboration, drive sustainable cultural change, and improve students' academic and professional preparation. This project's intellectual merit is that it is grounded in the engineering education literature, and in preliminary data collected to show the value of the proposed plan to the institution's campus. The project involves relevant campus partners like the Integrated STEM Education Research Center. Project outcomes should provide insights into students' perceived value of the courses, and the courses themselves contributing to instructors' increased understanding of how to engage, retain, and prepare students for the workforce. If the subsequent proposal is successful, this work will provide insight into how curricular innovation and multi-departmental collaboration and culture can impact students' development and the professional formation of engineers. Such work will ultimately have broader impact by strengthening the regional and national workforce, producing highly skilled graduates who are ready for the multidimensional nature of the modern workforce through their deep knowledge in a disciplinary core, and broad reach into related fields. The project will begin its planning for a Track 2 proposal with a focused effort on Electrical Engineering and Circuits I, laying the groundwork for broader curricular innovation and collaboration across the full series. Strategic partnerships include faculty across all engineering departments, university administration, industry advisors, and students. These stakeholders will contribute to developing scalable practices that support long-term cultural transformation. Faculty representatives from all departments, led by a sophomore series coordinator, will collaboratively develop cohesive curricular structures, shared language, and enrichment modules aligned with industry needs. This project will use expectancy-value theory to guide a mixed methods investigation into how all engineering students and faculty from all departments perceive the value of the sophomore course sequence and how curricular innovations and cross-departmental collaboration influence those perceptions. The research will include surveys, performance assessments, and stakeholder feedback to provide a comprehensive understanding of the impact of course design and departmental culture on perceived course value. Expected outcomes of the anticipated Track 2 include increased faculty collaboration, improved student experience, enhanced alignment between course content and industry practices, and professional formation of engineers. These outcomes will contribute to the overall goal of establishing the foundation for sustainable and meaningful cultural transformation across multiple departments at Louisiana Tech University. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.