Engineering Student Retention: Development Of A Validated, Quantitative Instrument For Exploring The Role Of Personal And Institutional Context

Retention of engineering students is a much-studied subject. The bulk of existing literature focuses on students in large, Research-I institutions Î arguably schools sharing a common context or educational dynamic. Current instruments available to study retention have not focused on how motivations, interests, and individual backgrounds (psychosocial and personal attributes) may vary with educational context (institutional attributes) and, as a result, may very ygnn"okuu"curgevu"qh"c"uvwfgpvÓu"ngctpkpi"gzrgtkgpeg"vjcv"eqwnf"dg"rctvkewnctn{"korqtvcpv"vq retention. Studies from both engineering education and social sciences such as educational psychology fail to fully examine how the educational environment interacts with personal experiences and attributes among engineering students to influence retention among all students; of particular interest is retention of females, since this population of engineering students has consistently reflected higher attrition from the field of study. The role of context in the development of instruments for retention studies needs to be studied more thoroughly. For this work, we are developing a new survey instrument to explore the effects of context on engineering retention; this article describes the pilot test of the instrument. Seven factors related to retention, as reported in engineering education, science education, and educational psychology literature, were identified as relevant to measuring educational context and therefore selected for study: 1) Cultural influences, including family and friends 2) Recruitment activities to engineering, as experienced before entering college 3) Participation in engineering-related activities 4) Self-perception and self-efficacy 5) Motivations for studying engineering 6) Definitions of success, personally and academically 7) Perceptions of the learning environment. For each factor, a set of Likert scale survey stems was developed. In addition, demographic data were included. The stems were reviewed by an expert panel in accordance with best practice in the field of educational psychology, and the resulting instrument was pilot-tested with 224 engineering undergraduates. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used for validation purposes. Future work will involve quantitative-analysis-driven modification of the instrument, followed by administration at multiple institutions with varying contexts and comparisons to further explore the role of context in engineering retention. We will add a qualitative research component to enrich our understanding of the role of context in student decision-making associated with undergraduate engineering program retention. P ge 13522.2 Introduction The retention of engineering undergraduate students is a much-studied topic. Nationally, 56% of students admitted to undergraduate engineering programs eventually graduate with an engineering degree. 1 By comparison, 70% of undergraduates from all majors at 4-year institutions had either graduated or were still enrolled after five years. 2 This low retention rate is counterintuitive; one might expect the retention rate among engineering students to be higher than the general college population, as engineering programs often have more rigorous entrance requirements and thus attract a very capable subset of students. However, even if engineering retention was keeping pace with other programs, the pure retention percentages may very well miss the real story. The issue may not be simply whether enough students are graduating in engineering, but additionally what types of students are graduating. If the current system of engineering education preferentially retains or loses students of a certain personality, learning style, gender, ethnicity, cultural background, etc., then the entire engineering field (and therefore, society) suffers from this loss of richness. The learning environment can vary at both the institutional level (for example, Research-1 university versus a small, private, undergraduate-only college) and at the program level (for example, welcoming and supportive departments versus highly competitive departments, or other departmental dynamics that could transcend institutional characteristics). If particular types of engineering programs are inadvertently failing to retain types of students as a result of learning environment dynamics, then the field of engineering is again potentially suffering from a loss of richness. As Baillie and Fitzgerald point out, the engineering profession demands a creative, innovative workforce, and engineering educators must be vigilantly self-reflective and field-critical Ðvq" ensure that we are not losing to other professions the very students who will make the best future gpikpggtu0Ñ Current work on retention tends to focus on two areas: identifying the reasons for a student leaving engineering, 4-7 or assessing an intervention that was tried. 8-10 For the most part, students do not leave the engineering major because of poor academic performance or lack of ability. Rather, there is often dissatisfaction with the major itself, or with the teaching and learning environment. 3,4 Many studies also note a lack of self-efficacy (self-confidence specific to the tasks of engineering) among students who leave. 11,12 This low self-efficacy is often a poor representation of real ability, as measured by objective evidence. 13 Much current effort is also dedicated to assessment of existing intervention programs. In order to translate such work to new settings, it would first be necessary to identify how the students (and their reasons for persisting in or leaving engineering) are similar at different schools and in different types of programs (or engineering departments). This strategy requires having a way to measure both the characteristics that correlate with persistence as well as factors that are associated with the context in which engineering students function (for example, perceptions of the learning environment at the departmental level as well as the larger institution). Existing research on retention often does look specifically at the retention of women or other underrepresented groups. However, the bulk of the research is done within the context of the large engineering school at Research-I institutions. A growing number of students are choosing to study engineering in an alternative setting: at a smaller school, within a liberal arts college, or P ge 13522.3 in another less traditional setting for engineering. 14 These schools may attract a different population of engineering students, based on how their individual motivations, experiences, and personal attributes interact with program-level (i.e., departmental and/or institutional) dynamics. For example, the American Society of Engineering Education compiles annual statistics on the student body of most U.S. engineering programs. Of the 20 schools reporting the highest percentage qh"yqogp"gctpkpi"dcejgnqtÓu"fgitggu."qpn{"qpg"*OKV+"ycu"cnuq"nkuvgf"coqpi"vjg"vqr" 15% of schools in terms of total number qh"dcejgnqtÓu"fgitees awarded (to women and men). While many things can affect this male/female student ratio, including types of engineering degrees offered, it is notable that women may in fact have a tendency to choose schools that are not among the largest engineering schools, where much current retention research is done. These non-Research-I engineering schools also see high attrition rates. However, there is no reason to expect that the students at these schools are leaving engineering for the same reasons as the students at the Research-I schools. The students at smaller institutions deliberately chose a different venue for their studies, and this may very well point to an underlying difference in the students themselves: different motivations, interests, abilities, and so forth. Therefore, existing retention research may not offer answers to these schools as to how to improve retention rates. Further, even if the reasons for student attrition were known, these non-traditional engineering schools are not always able to offer the same types of interventions typically available and studied in the current research. Thus, it may not be sufficient to study retention as if all engineering students are retained by the same things. There is already a tacit acknowledgement that some student populations may have different needs for intervention (for example, consider the large number of Women in Engineering programs now offered across the country). Considering context as a part of the retention question opens the door to considering the entire gfwecvkqpcn"gpxktqpogpv"cpf"jqy"kv"kpvgtcevu"ykvj"c"uvwfgpvÓu"rgtuqpcnkv{."ewnvwtg."ngctpkpi" styles, and more. It may well be that the stereotypical culture of engineering education is (unnecessarily) self-perpetuating, since those who do not enjoy or thrive in that culture do not succeed to continue on to graduate school and become engineering professors. Within the existing literature on retention, we could not find a suitable survey instrument which would allow identification and correlation of contextual factors related to retention of students in engineering. Furthermore, no existing instruments were available that would adequately and relevantly explore retention (and lack thereof) among diverse educational settings. In order to oczkok¦g"qwt"wpfgtuvcpfkpi"qh"vjg"rtkoct{"kphnwgpegu"qp"uvwfgpvuÓ"ejqkeg"vq"uvc{"ykvj"qt"ngcxg" engineering programs, an instrument is needed that specifically ogcuwtgu"uvwfgpvuÓ"rgtegrvkqpu" of contextual factors. This article documents development and pilot-testing of such an instrument at one liberal-arts institution. In the future, the instrument will be refined and data will be collected from engineering students in a wide range of program types, variable by institutional size, institutional type (for example, public versus private), and departmental characteristics (for example, faculty-to-s