Student performance impacted from modifying a first-year/semester engineering core course during a global pandemic

This Research Full Paper considers the effects of abruptly migrating a first-semester engineering core course into a hybrid, partially online as a response to a global pandemic. This study combines both quantitative and qualitative methods to perform a retrospective analysis to identify and explain the effects of the sudden changes on students’ performance in a course at a large research university in the southwestern continental United States. The qualitative portion of this study focuses on student performance as an important factor that directly impacts and concerns many students. The study first compares student performance on similar course materials provided in Fall of 2019 and 2020, pre- and post-pandemic respectively. The Fall 2020 course transitioned to a hybrid format, combining online content delivery with in-room class meetings synchronously, as part of precautions due to the pandemic. We utilize statistical analyses methods such as t-tests on existing student performance data. Preliminary results indicated that the Fall 2020 students performed worse on the first exam than those of their 2019 counterparts, leading to closer examinations of specific assignments that contribute to the exam performance. Using particular assignments we broke down which topics contributed most to the contrasting performance on each exam and what specific adjustments to make so that Fall 2020 students’ performance became up to par with Fall 2019 students by the second exam.