2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Evidence-based Practice paper examines student-related outcomes associated with participation in a novel peer mentoring program (PMP) for traditionally underrepresented first-year students in the school of engineering at a predominantly white institution (PWI). Engineering education programs often retain students of color at disproportionately lower rates than their white peers, which causes inequitable outcomes for students and limits diversity within the engineering profession. The PMP discussed in this study was recently institutionalized within a school of engineering to reduce achievement gaps by improving the student experience and associated academic outcomes of traditionally underrepresented (TU) students. The first full year of program implementation concluded in Spring 2023; thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the efficacy of the PMP as a strategy for promoting student success, particularly as it relates to participants’ first-year retention and academic achievement. The research questions guiding this work are: RQ1) Is there a relationship between participation in a peer mentoring program and the retention of traditionally underrepresented first-year students in engineering at a PWI? RQ2) Is there a relationship between participation in a peer mentoring program and the academic outcomes of traditionally underrepresented first-year students in engineering at a PWI?

The design and implementation of the PMP was grounded in evidence-based practices related to the transition to college, first-year retention, underrepresented racial minorities and first-generation students in engineering, and student thriving. To be eligible to participate in the PMP, a student must be enrolled full-time in the school of engineering and be an incoming college student. Further, students must identify as an underrepresented racial minority (Black, Hispanic, or Native American), a first-generation college student, and/or as coming from a low-socioeconomic background (indicated by Pell Grant-eligibility). Students who participated in the PMP are referred to as PMP students (n=35), and minoritized students who chose not to participate in the PMP (n=51) are referred to as peer mentoring program-eligible (PMP-E). We refer to students not eligible for the program as non-traditionally underrepresented (non-TU) students (n=143).

To address RQ1, we performed a series of chi-square analyses to assess first-year retention data for the 2021 and 2022 cohorts of engineering students. For the 2021 cohort, we found that non-TU students were retained at a significantly higher rate than TU students (x2(1, N=207) =4.019, p=0.045), which aligns with broader trends related to academic persistence gaps for traditionally underrepresented students in engineering. After the implementation of the PMP, we found no significant difference between the first-year retention of non-TU and TU students (x2(1, N=229) =0.044, p=0.834), indicating that traditionally underrepresented populations persisted in engineering at similar rates to their non-TU peers. Further, we found that those who participated in the PMP were retained in engineering at a significantly higher rate than those who were eligible for the program, but did not participate (x2(1, N=85) =5.639, p=0.018), indicating a positive relationship between program participation and retention. The finding that traditionally underrepresented students in the PMP were retained at higher rates than non-minoritized students suggests the PMP may be an important mechanism for closing equity gaps in engineering education.

To address RQ2, we analyzed first-year GPA and completed term hours for the 2022 cohort of first-year engineering students. First, we compared the first-year cumulative GPA of all TU students to non-TU students. We found that the non-TU population had significantly higher first-year GPAs than their TU peers (t=3.209, p=0.002; see Table 2). Since RQ2 seeks to understand the relationship between participation in the PMP and student academic performance, we then evaluated the outcomes for the TU subpopulations (PMP and PMP-E) against their non-marginalized peers. Like the larger TU population, PMP-E students had a significantly lower cumulative first-year GPA than non-TU students (t=2.898, p=0.005). When comparing program participants to their non-TU peers, however, we found no statistical differences between the mean GPAs of the two groups (t=1.693, p=0.097). The absence of significant differences in these outcomes suggests that the PMP may contribute to reducing inequity in the school of engineering. Finally, we observed no significant differences related to first-years’ completed term hours among the populations, however PMP students completed 0.44 credit hours more, on average, than PMP-E students, which has practical implications for degree completion. Our findings suggest that the PMP described in this study represents a successful intervention related to increasing the academic achievement of traditionally underrepresented first-year students in engineering.