This evidence-based practice paper describes a living-learning community model for first-and second-year engineering students. Our residential community is designed to foster an educational experience that effectively supports and reinforces academic excellence in the classroom while infusing leadership practices into the physical and developmental spaces our students share. We do this by supporting academic foundations in engineering, promoting community responsibility, and teaching principles of leadership. Our programming model includes cohort-style engineering' coursework, bi-weekly course reviews, and a collaborative service-learning project in which second-year students are project managers and first-year students are team members. The Engineering Leadership Community started as a retention strategy in 2009. Students who do not integrate socially and academically into their institution of higher learning are more likely to depart from college before earning a degree (1). In fact, student engagement can actually compensate for academic under preparedness, giving students the opportunity to connect to more academic support (2); (3); (4). By providing a physical environment for students in engineering majors to live, our program has historically allowed students to make academic and social connections early in their college career, which better supports their persistence. In recent years, students in the Engineering Leadership Community have taken multiple classes in the same sections together, including a one-credit academic success course and their introductory engineering lab. This method uses Tinto's learning community model, helping students to make connections between courses with their peers (1).
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