2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

__ is a Carnegie High Research Activity University that has approximately 20% of its 7500 undergraduates as engineering majors, is geographically distanced from large metropolitan areas but draws its student population both statewide and regionally, and operates on the quarter calendar. ___ merged the math, chemistry and physic programs with the engineering, technology and computer science programs into a single college in 1995, and created an integrated freshman engineering curriculum in 1998. ___ has a long history of educational innovations in engineering education, with a hands on project based approach implemented in 2004, and four other NSF funded programs to increase student success in engineering since 2007.

The SUCCESS Scholars Program (SSP) is an NSF funded effort established in Fall of 2022 to build on these prior efforts by providing financial, academic, personal, and professional support to engineering students starting in their first year of college through four years of academic study. Two cohorts of students have completed their first year of this program which included three to four additional days of supplemental instruction a week, an extra Friday session in their Engineering classes, and weekly lunches each to build community within the students. The supplemental instruction in the first year was targeted towards the engineering and math courses that all students were taking. Although the program continues career development, social support, and financial assistance into the sophomore year, the supplemental instruction and extra Friday engineering sessions were phased out as students segregated among seven engineering disciplines.

The SSP program has resulted in a statistically significant increase in exam performance in first-year engineering and mathematics classes and a much higher success rate of completing the final first-year engineering and math course by the end of Fall sophomore year, which has been shown to be a critical marker for graduation in engineering. This paper assesses two years of quarterly GPA for the 15 SSP students in the first cohort that participated in SI sessions across all three quarters of their first year, along with all 62 other engineering students that demonstrated similar academic progress over their freshman year to determine the persistence of this intervention and the effects of scaling back academic support. The results indicate that removal of the SI sessions in the second year did not hinder the continued success of the SSP students.