2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete evidence-based practice paper focuses on the impact an introductory, makerspace course has on engineering student retention. The course, titled Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice II (ENGR 111), is a requisite for all J.B. Speed School of Engineering first-year engineering students, features integration and application of institutionally-identified fundamental engineering topics (first introduced and practiced in prerequisite Engineering Methods, Tools, & Practice I), and takes place in a 15,000 square foot facility located on the University of Louisville’s campus. ENGR 111 was inaugurated in the Spring 2017 semester, and primary course iterations have occurred during every spring semester since.

One research-cited reason that collegiate students leave engineering is a lack of engineering-related experiences during the first year of the program. Conventional first-year engineering curricula require students to complete multiple gateway courses prior to beginning disciplinary coursework. These courses oftentimes deal with abstract material with little perceived engineering context. As a result, students end up believing that all engineering courses will be similar, and some ultimately leave for other professional arenas where applications can be understood much earlier in academic career(s). A key motivating factor in developing ENGR 111 was to augment student desire to persist in engineering degree pursuit, by providing support and context for many of the requisite gateway courses and to provide a more substantial engineering-related experience.

Starting in the Spring 2019 semester and included in every subsequent course semester up to present day (thus providing a large sample size of thousands of responses), ENGR 111 students were surveyed on this topic at the end of the semester(s). Specifically, students were asked: To what extent do you intend to keep pursuing an engineering major?, via a 10-point Likert scale (10 = definitely will and 1 = definitely will NOT). This question was then followed up with the following query: Please indicate below how much (if any) impact your ENGR 111 experience had on the answer you provided on the previous question related to your intent to keep pursuing an engineering major. Possible responses to this question were ENGR 111 had no impact, somewhat of an impact, or significant impact on the response to the first question on engineering retention.

For each of the five different semesters of ENGR 111 in which data was collected, over 80% of the student body specified high intent (Likert values of 8-10) to continue pursuing an engineering degree. Associated results show evidence for optimism that ENGR 111 is having a positive impact on this aforementioned high desire to persist. Out of nearly 2000 ENGR 111 students over a 6-year period, 78.8% of the students who specified a high intent to continue pursuing their engineering degree also specified ENGR 111 to have at least somewhat of an impact on that intent, while nearly one quarter specified their ENGR 111 experience to have a significant impact on their strong desire to persist to earning an engineering degree.