Understanding the Classroom Climate in a First-Year Engineering Course with Near-Peer Mentoring

This research full paper is a study by the first-year engineering program at Michigan Technological University. Since 1999, the Department of Engineering Fundamentals has prided itself on our active, collaborative, first-year engineering program. While we have undergone many shifts in instructional models (e.g., blended learning, flipped learning), our dedication to this type of classroom environment has held firm. Most recently, our department moved to a flipped model of instruction and the inclusion of a significant peer mentoring presence in the classroom. With these major instructional changes, we evaluated the student perceptions of the classroom climate and identified that a majority of our students are experiencing a positive, active, and collaborative learning environment where they feel supported by their peers, student mentors and instructors and confident in their success as future engineers. This paper details our study approach, methods, and results