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2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering Persistence: Assessing Initiatives for First-Year Engineering Students

Presented at ERM: Examining Undergraduate Recruitment & Retention

This empirical research full paper will describe a project that aims to increase graduation rates among low-income, academically talented engineering students by focusing on initiatives for first-year students. We target this group based on Tinto’s conceptual model of student motivation and persistence, which emphasizes the impact of early interventions on improving students’ likelihood of graduating.

According to Tinto, these interventions can enhance persistence if they support a better integration of the students into the academic and social life of the institution manifested in four key elements: clarity of their goals, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and perception of the curriculum’s relevance.

Supported by an NSF-SSTEM grant, we developed and integrated initiatives aiming to increase the four key elements. These initiatives include scholarships, an Engineering Learning Community (ELC) that promotes cohort-based learning and living, mentorship, and participation in personal and professional development seminars. We also integrated inclusive practices into first-year engineering lab courses to enhance the curriculum’s relevance and accessibility. This paper seeks to provide validity evidence for an instrument designed to assess whether these initiatives positively influence students’ college experiences and persistence. By establishing validity, we aim to determine whether similar programs could benefit other institutions striving to enhance student persistence.

Preliminary results of our work with data collected in 2023 from more than 200 First-Year Engineering students at a four-year institution in the Northeastern U.S. suggest that the 29-item survey measures six factors related to the 4 key elements. The six factors are confidence with the professor, sense of belonging, engineering identity, goals and intent to pursue, test assignment confidence, and DEI components. These six factors are interconnected with the four key elements, offering a more detailed breakdown into specific categories and descriptions. Therefore, the six factors should measure persistence in the same way as the four elements.

In this paper, we extended our analysis using data collected in 2024, adding over 400 more responses. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and will follow with a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to further evaluate the developed instrument. We expect the results to provide stronger validity evidence of which survey items measure the six factors related to the components affecting persistence. Moving forward, we will perform statistical tests to determine whether students participating in these initiatives show higher values in the four key elements and demonstrate greater persistence compared to non-participants. These findings will help assess the effectiveness of our initiatives and guide any necessary revisions.

Authors

Mr. Matthew Currey Rowan University [biography]

Matthew Currey is a graduate student pursing his Ph.D. degree in Engineering Education. Matthew graduated with his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering technology in the May of 2024 and is now on his first year of graduate school. Matthew is also currently an adjunct professor at his community college teaching First-Year students. He has a passion in helping First-Year students and working on new initiative programs to help support undergraduate students.
Dr. Juan M Cruz http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7426-682X Rowan University [biography]

Juan M. Cruz is an assistant professor in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University. He has a B.S. in Electronic Engineering and a Masters in Education from Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and a PhD in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. His research uses a systems perspective to understand the dynamics of the academic system and how it influences faculty motivation to change, undergraduate students’ motivation to learn, and retention and persistence of doctoral students (with special attention to underrepresented minority (URM) students).
Dr. Kaitlin Mallouk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4367-1165 Rowan University [biography]

Kaitlin Mallouk is an Associate Professor of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University. Prior to beginning that role, she spent five years an Instructor in the Mechanical Engineering and Experiential Engineering Education Departments at Rowan.
Dr. Stephanie Farrell Rowan University [biography]

Dr. Stephanie Farrell is Professor and Founding Department Head of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University (USA). Prior to 2016 she was a faculty member in Chemical Engineering at Rowan.
Dr. Justin Charles Major http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3111-8509 Rowan University [biography]

Dr. Justin C. Major (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Experiential Engineering Education at Rowan University where they leads ASPIRE Lab (Advancing Student Pathways through Inequality Research in Engineering). Justin’s research focuses on low-income students, engineering belonging and marginalization mechanisms, adverse childhood experiences, and feminist approaches to EER, and connects these topics to broader understandings of student success in engineering. Justin completed their Ph.D. in Engineering Education (’22) and M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics (’21) at Purdue University, and two B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Secondary Mathematics Education at the University of Nevada, Reno (’17). Atop their education, Justin is a previous NSF Graduate Research Fellow and has won over a dozen awards for research, service, and activism related to marginalized communities, including the 2020 ASEE ERM Division Best Diversity Paper for their work on test anxiety. As a previous homeless and food-insecure student, Justin is eager to challenge and change engineering engineering education to be a pathway for socioeconomic mobility and broader systemic improvement rather than an additional barrier.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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