2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Retention in collegiate engineering programs is a problem not specific to a single college or university, but across the engineering field, and this pilot study introduces a new approach for improving this retention issue. Studies report that up to 50% of students who begin an engineering degree program do not complete it, and this attrition is particularly high for students in their first and second years of engineering programs. Research suggests that a key contributing factor for why students leave the engineering field is the stress they feel from their coursework, yet considering how to alleviate this coursework stress is relatively unexplored. This study explores how to improve the negative stress responses students associate with early engineering coursework by restructuring the way the class is managed. Specifically, this study will test the efficacy of making small structural changes in an entry-level course to reduce the rigor shock students feel in introductory engineering courses and will qualify the impact those changes have on students’ perceptions of engineering coursework and their decision to stay in the field. This study considers two different sections of a first-year engineering fundamentals course taught in a small midwestern university. Both sections of the course present the same content with the same general lectures, the same assignments, and the same assessments, but they are operated with different structures in terms of classroom management, assignment submission, and grading policies. Students' perceptions of their stress while taking the course will be captured upon course completion and the data will be quantitatively analyzed and examined through a constructivist lens to unearth new information about how these changes may impact student perceptions of their long-term self-efficacy in engineering and ultimately their decision to persist in the field. The data will also be reviewed to consider whether this impact differs for diverse student populations. This study is an early investigation into the impact of course structure on retention in engineering that will be used to help guide future work aimed at operationalizing how faculty can adjust their course structure to improve retention in engineering programs on a broader scale.