Engineering Student Retention: Development of a Validated, Quantitative Instrument for Exploring the Role of Personal and Institutional Context

摘要

Retention of engineering students is a much-studied subject. The bulk of existing literature focuses on students in large, Research-I institutions - arguably schools sharing a common context or educational dynamic. Current instruments available to study retention have not focused on how motivations, interests, and individual backgrounds (psychosocial and personal attributes) may vary with educational context (institutional attributes) and, as a result, may very well miss aspects of a student's learning experience that could be particularly important to retention. Studies from both engineering education and social sciences such as educational psychology fail to fully examine how the educational environment interacts with personal experiences and attributes among engineering students to influence retention among all students; of particular interest is retention of females, since this population of engineering students has consistently reflected higher attrition from the field of study. The role of context in the development of instruments for retention studies needs to be studied more thoroughly.