Using Research-Based Strategies To Retain Engineering Students

 ENGAGE:  Using Research Based Strategies to Retain Engineering Students

ENGAGE - Engaging Students in Engineering, (www.EngageEngineering.org) is a five-year Extension Services project funded by the National Science Foundation's Research on Gender in Science and Engineering program.  The overarching goal of ENGAGE is to increase the capacity of engineering schools to retain undergraduate students by facilitating the implementation of three strategies to improve students’ day-to-day classroom and educational experience. 

 ENGAGE selected the following three strategies because research indicates that they improve retention of undergraduate engineering students, particularly women, and because they are enhancements rather than wholesale changes to the curriculum:

• Spatial Visualization Skills: Assess students’ spatial visualization skills and implement proven teaching and learning strategies to improve students’ spatial skills.
• Everyday Examples in Engineering (E3^s): Involve faculty who teach 1^st and 2^nd year courses in efforts to use and develop examples that are familiar and engaging to students to illustrate theoretical concepts.
• Faculty- Student Interaction: Involve engineering faculty who teach 1^st and 2^nd year courses in efforts that build faculty knowledge and skill to better engage and interact with undergraduate engineering students inside and outside of the classroom.

Twenty engineering schools are currently working to implement ENGAGE strategies in the freshmen and sophomore years when student attrition is highest.  A third cohort of 10 schools will be identified in 2012.  Although schools who are participating formally in ENGAGE are supported in a variety of ways, all engineering schools have the capacity to integrate ENGAGE methods into the undergraduate experience and have access to ENGAGE resources through webinars, electronic newsletters and www.EngageEngineering.org.