Enhancing Engineering Student Success: A Pedagogy For Changing Behaviors

Whether we need to bring about greater success on the part of engineering students is not the topic of this paper. The fact that we do is assumed to be self-evident. We only have to consider the anecdotal statements of engineering professors that “students aren’t what they used to be,” or measure our graduates against the outcomes established by the new ABET Engineering Criteria 2000, 1 or look at the low transfer rates of students who start engineering study in community colleges, or look at the differentially low retention of minority students (African American, Hispanic, and Native American) to convince ourselves that there is lots of room for improvement. If that’s not enough, we can always take the TQM view that “no matter how good we are doing, we should always strive to be better.”