How Science Course Performance Influences Student Retention A Statistical Investigation

Identifying science courses that influence retention of engineering students should be useful in suggesting approaches to improving student success by focusing the attention of educational reforms on the areas of greatest need. The purpose of this study is to statistically identify those required science courses in engineering degree programs that have a significant influence on retention and estimate the magnitude of their impact. We draw our inferences from a database of all engineering students at the University of Florida between Spring 1996 and Spring 2002. Defining retention as either graduation or current enrollment in the final year of the database, a series of logistic regression models are formulated to estimate the effect on retention in engineering by core science courses in three major areas: mathematics, physics and chemistry. Odds ratios on retention are reported and rank ordered as an indication of the strength and relative importance of each course’s impact, and we find that the student performance in only a fraction of the core courses has predictive value on engineering retention. These results raise questions about the relationship of the core courses to the later curriculum, and suggest that curriculum development and academic advising should reflect the variation within the science core and resist the temptation to treat the core uniformly.