2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Student performance and retention in STEM majors is a major concern in higher education. Individual attention and coaching are effective at improving the retention of under-performing students, but these tools are too labor-intensive for faculty to apply in large introductory courses. Additionally, many struggling students are limited by non-cognitive factors such as fear of failure, social anxiety, and general overwhelm. There is a need for large-format, scalable instructional tools that both engage students in course material and address non-cognitive factors in an appropriate way.

This Work In Progress will present the effects of a remedial intervention, the “reflective knowledge inventory”, at improving student outcomes in Calculus 1. This intervention was developed over several years in sophomore through senior-level engineering classes post-pandemic. In the intervention, students improve their exam score by submitting a “reflective knowledge inventory”. Expert learners know that new skills are best built on existing knowledge, and that big problems should be broken into smaller tasks. Novice learners are more likely to feel overwhelmed and panicked, especially when they know they are underperforming. We attempted to design a remedial assignment that scaffolds students through the process of identifying technical strengths to build on and breaking weaknesses into manageable chunks. Briefly, students create a glossary of terms and concepts from the class and rank them by their level of understanding. Importantly, the assignment also includes reflections on emotions, barriers, and support networks. This work will combine quantitative analysis of student grades with thematic analysis of student submissions to determine the effectiveness of the intervention.