Work in Progress: Improving First-Year Retention of Underprepared Students Through Support and Engagement

摘要

With the continued demand for a highly skilled and diverse engineering workforce the problem of understanding factors that influence retention in engineering remains significant. Becoming an engineering major requires students to spend considerable amounts of time and effort building up their knowledge base in mathematics, physics, chemistry and computation. As a result, many students at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College do not take actual engineering classes until their sophomore year. Based on campus data, the majority of our students who switch out of engineering do so after poor performance in a prerequisite mathematics or science course in their first year; hence they leave the engineering program often before they have had the chance to take a single engineering class. Based on our data, underrepresented minority students, especially females, are disproportionately affected. We hypothesize that this student cohort often exhibits lower levels of confidence in their mathematical abilities leading them to the conclusion they are 'not good enough' to succeed in mathematics classes. This is also paired with the belief that if they don't do well in math they will not succeed in engineering. We are exploring remedies to help these students - those who want to be engineers but may not be as well prepared in math and science - persist. In this paper, we will focus on group study sessions, which were implemented in the fall of 2016, to provide both academic and emotional support to students as they build their knowledge base in the prerequisite classes.