Integrating Humanitarian Engineering Design Projects to Increase Retention of Underrepresented Minority Students and to Achieve Interpersonal Skill-Related Learning Outcomes

This complete evidence-based practice paper analyzes the effectiveness of a newly implemented design project module in a second-semester introduction to engineering course at ChandlerGilbert Community College (AZ). Engineering and library faculty have collaborated with biological sciences faculty, local industry, and the college’s facilities director to develop and implement the project each semester since Fall 2014. This seven-week design project module introduces freshman engineering students to the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) Grand Challenges for Engineering (2017), providing students opportunities to discover and explore the myriad of ways engineering serves to improve society. Engineering programs typically see student retention rates of only 60% after the first year, and the percentage of women in most undergraduate engineering programs has remained at or below 20% for decades, as estimated from enrollment and degrees awarded from National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics data (2012). Further research indicates that women in engineering programs value social context in their program of study. To this end, the design project discussed in this paper integrates humanitarian application experiences using the NAE Grand Challenges as well as campus-specific projects. It is hypothesized that implementation of this module will a) increase students’ perspective of engineering as a socially meaningful career option and, b) show higher retention and successful completion by female and underrepresented minority students enrolled in the course. This paper describes the design project module and its effectiveness to date. Effectiveness was evaluated using Chandler-Gilbert Community College’s Institutional Research’s fall 2014 through fall 2016 data on students’ enrollment and successful completion of the course, as well as ongoing assessment of graded materials and institutional student learning outcomes. Successful completion of the course among female students and underrepresented minority students was 100% and 94% respectively in the Intervention sections as compared to 81% and 77% in course sections at the same institution taught with traditional curriculum and 86% and 87% for course sections taught across the community college system (district-wide) using traditional curriculum.