What Have We Learned from a Systematic Review of Literature on Hispanic Transfer Students in Engineering?

This paper describes preliminary results of a literature search. The purpose of our study is to synthesize all of the relevant prior work regarding Hispanic students matriculating through twoyear to four-year institutions and completing engineering bachelor’s degrees. The approach we are using to identify and synthesize the articles is systematic review methodology. Systematic review is a set of methodologies to identify relevant primary studies (e.g., journal articles, technical reports, conference papers) from multiple sources and synthesize results from these studies. The inclusion criteria we have defined for the articles we will synthesize are: (1) provides a clear definition of how student success was defined, e.g., transfer, retention, graduation, intent to complete degree; (2) presents empirical evidence of at least one individual or contextual factor that contributes to success of students at two-year institutions or who have transferred from a two-year to a four-year institution in the United States; (3) presents results or comparison of Hispanic students, Hispanic-serving institutions, or STEM students; and (4) published as a report, article, conference paper, or dissertation in English. This study emphasizes Hispanic transfer students in engineering for several reasons. Firstly, representation of Hispanics in engineering careers is well below their significant and growing proportion of the U.S. population. Secondly, although substantial research has identified cultural and socioeconomic challenges that Hispanic students are facing, there is a dearth of large scale and/or quantitative work focusing on Hispanic students in engineering disciplines. Lastly, few (if any) systematic studies of effective interventions for Hispanic transfer engineering students exist. The intent of our study is to identify articles that have addressed Hispanic transfer students and synthesize results from the collected set. At present, we are still identifying articles that would support our study. This paper describes early results from the literature search to provide an overview of that has been found.