Retention of undergraduate engineering students remains a nationwide problem, and, in combination with the
difficulties of attracting more prospective students to the field, contributes to the current eight-year period of
stagnation in the number of engineering graduates. To address the engineering retention problem requires improved measurement
and assessment methodologies. The introduction of the new engineering accreditation criteria, EC-2000, directs a need for
better methods and metrics to assess engineering students and programs.
We are conducting a multi-institution longitudinal 3-year study that addresses two major issues in engineering education:
- To better understand the problem of engineering attrition including its causes and dimensions. Specifically, we are examining:
- How attitudes differ among student cohorts, particularly those of gender and ethnicity;
- How they are impacted by certain programmatic initiatives; and
- The extent to which these attitudes are correlated with retention and performance
- To develop more effective means of assessing engineering students and programs. We have developed and are developing a
series of closed form questionnaires to assess engineering student experiences as they matriculate through their engineering
studies. By tracking students throughout their freshman, sophomore and junior year, we will capture the following:
- Attitudes about the field of engineering and the reasons they chose to study engineering
- Self-Assessed confidence in students' background knowledge and skills
- Self-Assessed competence toward achievement of EC 2000 outcome criteria
EIF
|
Engineering Information Foundation
(Grant 98.4)
|
NASA
|
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(Grant )
|
NSF
|
National Science Foundation
(Grant 9872498)
|
Website by
Luis F. Luna
fluna@utep.edu
