Faculty and administrators in engineering programs across the country will readily admit to being puzzled by a shared national phenomenon: while the number of engineering jobs continues to increase, the retention rate of freshman engineering students remains disturbingly low (43%). In a positive national context for employment in engineering, there is an urgent need for research to examine the institutional, pedagogical, and personal reasons for students to give up their pursuit of a career in engineering. Our study proposes to investigate this phenomenon in ways that can help to inform and reform undergraduate education in engineering.
The central question guiding the proposed research project is what can be done to help engineering students to be successful in college and in their profession given the fact that the teaching culture can't be changed instantly?
Grounded in existing research on student achievement in engineering, the present proposal seeks to investigate those skills and attributes that create successful and personally motivated undergraduate engineering students. We propose a five-year longitudinal, multi-phased study with following components: Phase 1) Learning strategies, attitudes, and success of engineering freshmen; Phase 2) Effectiveness of Coached/Integrated Cognitive Empowerment of Engineering Freshmen; 3) Longitudinal Effect of Cognitive Empowerment Beyond Freshmen Year.
The goal of Phase 1 is to establish a thorough understanding of "what freshmen do" when it comes to "college-study" and how or whether their behavior changes during the first year. We propose to use a combination of previously validated instruments and personal interviews to generate a bank of relevant data from approximately 1000 engineering freshmen starting in August 2002, as well as from engineering students at higher levels. This data will provide baseline information for the design of a series of interventions targeted to students rather than the teaching environment; that is, rather than proposing new courses, teaching methods, or instructional delivery systems, we will focus on the identifying and providing cognitive and learning strategies that foster healthy habits and coach students to remove weaknesses in the context of the existing culture in engineering education into which first-year students are immersed, both at NC State and at many other engineering programs.
Based on the experience gained from Phase 2, the project will embark on sustained monitoring of student successes as they matriculate in different engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical) and possibly continuing its interventions/support geared towards the different learning environments faced by the students. Based on the experience gained from Phase 2, the project will embark on sustained monitoring of student successes as they matriculate in different engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical), and possibly continuing appropriate interventions/support judged to be effective in increasing student success within the different learning environments encountered in the engineering curriculum.
The impact of this study is expected to be universal: engineering colleges nationally and internationally have established a similar teaching culture and face similar educational problems. We hope to demonstrate how empowering engineering freshmen to become effective and skilled learners can increase their level of success and with it their retention and lifelong interest in the pursuit of the intellectual and work-related goals of engineering.
