Evaluating the Impact of a Revised Introductory Engineering Course: Student Retention and Success as an Indicator

This work in progress describes changes that have been made to a freshmen introduction to engineering course, Engineering Problem Solving (EPS), and investigates whether or not those changes have positively impacted student retention in engineering. The changes include team teaching by instructors with strong teaching records, smaller class sizes, and an emphasis on analysis driven design. Cohorts of students who enrolled in the new and old versions of EPS were compared to one another and two seemingly contradictory trends were observed: students who enrolled in the new version of EPS were more likely to persist in engineering while the fraction of students passing the new version of EPS is lower than the fraction passing the old version. Combining these two observations lead to a statistically significant result: students who earn grades of C or higher in the new version of EPS are more likely to persist in engineering than students earning grades of C or higher in the old version of EPS. The focus on analysis driven design has made the course more rigorous and made it more comparable to upper division engineering courses. As such, the course has become a better indicator of persistence in the engineering curriculum.