Engaging Early Engineering Students (Eees): Background And Goals Of An Nsf Step Project To Increase Retention Of Early Engineering Students

Early “leavers” from engineering programs typically fall into one of two overlapping categories: (a) those who leave because of academic difficulties and (b) those who leave because they find the educational environment of early engineering to be hostile and/or not engaging. This paper describes a new NSF STEP project, EEES, that is a suite of four articulated programs that is designed to ease the transition of high school students into engineering undergraduate programs, and, by making the transition smoother, to increase the retention rate of early engineering students. Analysis of internal statistics has revealed key courses that are pivotal in promoting retention: early mathematics courses, first term physics, and a computational tools-for-problemsolving course. The EEES project is a collaborative effort between the College of Engineering at Michigan State University and Lansing Community College. EEES consists of four content subprograms: (a) a program to provide formative assessments in the key courses with follow-on “bootstrapping” tutorials, (b) a supplemental instruction program which we call the PAL (peer-assisted learning) subproject, (c) a program to directly engage engineering faculty with early engineering students, and (d) a program to develop and exploit course material from one key course in another. Our effort is not a conglomeration of the four independent subprojects; rather EEES is a system of four interrelated, articulated programs that will be more effective than the sum of its parts. We are approximately six months into a five year project; we do not present results in this paper. Rather, here we describe the motivation for our project, our explicit goals, the broad project architecture for our entire effort, and end with our current status. This report will set the stage for three companion papers, and for a series of future reports. The three companion papers describe our subproject applying “supplemental instruction,” a second subproject connecting our faculty more effectively to our early engineering students, and a third paper describing the methodology for research analysis that we will employ. 1. Motivation: Importance of increasing STEM numbers To sustain US leadership in science and technology we must increase the number of undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). An estimate from The Information Technology Association of America indicates that by 2015, a doubling in the number of STEM degrees will be required to keep pace with expected job openings. Yet the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation (NSB/NSF) recently reported trends in the growth of STEM degrees that does not remotely approach the numbers required. Moreover, NSB also reported that the United States production of STEM The project team is an active and established collaboration between MSU and Lansing Community College (LCC). Targets for the project are increasing retention and graduation rates in the MSU College of Engineering and the pre-engineering programs of LCC. Evaluation of our project is headed by a well-established center for evaluation located within MSU, the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research (IPPSR). Our methods and results should generalize to the single most important source of engineers in the United States: “R1” universities research active, usually large public institutions. Although producing more engineers is now a critical item in our state’s economic recovery, the need for more engineers is a nationwide phenomenon. Lessons that we by necessity must learn and apply in our state now will generalize across the country. 2. Current status of Engineering STEM enrollments/graduations in our