2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Educating the next generation of college students to be engineers is important for many reasons. From a societal perspective, engineers work together to solve problems and improve the quality of life for many people. For students, an engineering major unlocks the ability to get a job in a growing field with a myriad of opportunities. However, many engineering students do not make it through engineering school. At our university, less than 60 percent of engineering students graduate within six years. Researchers have discovered that many experiences and perceptions lead to attrition, including low grades, feelings of belonging uncertainty, imposter syndrome, financial issues, loss of interest in engineering, and other life stressors. Although it is possible to intervene on any one of these factors and hope to make a difference, designing interventions that target the most important contributors to student decision-making are likely to make the greatest improvement on retention rates. In addition, even though a vast amount of research has pointed to first-semester grades as being of extreme importance, second semester is oftentimes too late to intervene. It is therefore necessary to consider the student experience as a whole in the first semester and work towards identifying the most important causes for student attrition.

To that end, we will use the Situated Expectancy Value Theory (EVT) framework to consider the engineering student experience. SEVT proposes that student experiences lead to three important considerations: (1) their anticipated success in engineering, (2) how much they value an engineering degree, and (3) the perceived financial, emotional, and social cost of staying in engineering school. In this paper, we propose to use surveys deployed in the first week of school that measure the branches of SEVT to identify the most effective interventions for students. Along with their survey information, we will also use information about the student that we can gather from before they entered school, including standardized test scores, GPA, demographic data, and Pell eligibility. As a large public university that enrolled 25.2% racial minorities, 33.7% first generation students, and in which 37.7% of students were Pell-eligible as of Fall 2020, we present an opportunity to study this problem in our own student population.

To make these predictions, we will use an evolutionary neural network approach. The evolutionary approach improves upon itself to create the best possible predictive network, as it fine-tunes the correct number of layers and nodes that can make an optimum prediction. The algorithms will use retention data as output for the network and identify which of our students are most at risk, and which of the EVT facets is most appropriate for intervention. We plan to use the insights from our model to determine the most effective interventions for our student population. In future work, we plan to tailor our interventions to each student using explainable methods.