Longitudinal Study of Learning Communities in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering

In 1998, the Agricultural Engineering programme at Iowa State University turned to the pedagogical innovation termed `learning communities' in an effort to enhance student retention and to bring coherence and meaning to our first-year student curriculum. Not only has the learning community helped us to increase our first-year, first time student retention in the major of Agricultural Engineering (AE), it has helped us to address many of our AE programme objectives including students' abilities to function on multidisciplinary teams, communicate effectively and have knowledge of important contemporary issues. Results of the AE learning community assessment efforts suggest that students are overwhelmingly satisfied with the programme.