2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

According to national data, less than half the freshman who start in STEM majors graduate with a STEM degree, and at least half of this attrition occurs during the freshman and sophomore year. Clearly, the first two years are critical for both academic success and retention of STEM students. The retention rates of freshman and sophomore students are the lowest in all levels. One of the major reasons is STEM students failed in the bottleneck math courses in the first two years, which negatively impacts students’ confidence in STEM and significantly increased their financial burden and pressure. Nationwide, there are different interventions and student support services to help increase STEM students’ success in the bottleneck math courses, most of which rely on peer tutoring and mentoring during regular semesters. In a rural four-year university, although different mentoring and tutoring programs are offered to help students who are struggling in math courses, the DFW rates of these bottleneck math courses do not show significant improvements. The authors found out that the number of students using the available services are low compared to the class enrollment in most cases, while most of the students used the services only tried to ask help right before the exams. Many students were not able to use these available services outside their class schedule due to the needs of part-time jobs, children care, etc. In addition, the relationship and trust between peer mentors and students are not established before the beginning of these classes. With the support from U.S. Department of Education, a four-year university designed and implemented a two-day math boot camp program at beginning of each long semester in the last two years to provide critical help to students who have poor performance in selected math courses. The boot camp program did not teach the contents of the bottleneck courses that are currently taken by the students. Instead, the two-day boot camp will prepare the students to be ready for taking these bottleneck courses by building a solid background for each student. The boot camp is open to students who either received poor grade in a prerequisite course of their current math class or failed their current math class. During the boot camp, the faculty instructors used adaptive learning methods to help students learn basic knowledge and combine live instruction with after-class practices to ensure a smooth and successful learning process. Each selected course consists of 5-10 different learning modules. The faculty instructor taught these different learning modules, while a student mentor helped with the after-class practices. In the last two years, about 60 students participated in the boot camp program. Each student participant was tested before and after the boot camp to evaluate the immediate impact of the boot camp. In addition, the authors tracked the students’ academic performance before and after the boot camp to analyze both short-term and long-term impacts. This paper will discuss the detailed design and implementation of the boot camp and the impacts on the student participants.