Assessment of Supplemental Instruction Programming and Continued Academic Success

A main aspect of the Supplemental Instruction program’s mission is to help students develop transferable study skills that will improve their academic performance in all of their university coursework. At the University of Texas at Austin, the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department partnered with the learning center to provide Supplemental Instruction programming to the freshman-level course Introduction to Electrical Engineering (EE 302) in fall 2015. This course is the first part of a two-course sequence, the second of which is Circuit Theory (EE 411). Of the students enrolled in EE 411 in the spring 2016 semester, students who attended SI sessions during the fall 2015 EE 302 course had higher course grades than the nonattendees, even though this group’s spring 2016 end of semester grade point averages were lower and this group’s course grades in EE 302 were lower. To continue to investigate the long-term implications of SI attendance and gain a better understanding of what the SI program can offer students in the ECE program at UT Austin, future studies will benefit from additional data as students continue to progress through their program, and the inclusion of qualitative measures for a mixed-methods approach.