Implementation of an introductory engineering course and its impact on students' academic success and retention

Abstract

This Complete Research paper will describe the implementation of an introductory course (ENGR194) for first semester engineering students. The course is meant to improve retention and academic success of engineering first-year students in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The implementation of this course is part of an ongoing National Science Foundation (NSF) Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (S-STEM) project. This paper reports on the impact of combinatorial enrollment in ENGR194 and a previously described two-week Summer Bridge Program (SBP) offered only for entering S-STEM scholars before their first semester. To measure the impact of this course on student retention and academic success, various evaluation metrics are compared for three separate Comparison Groups (C-Groups) of students. The results show that the ENGR194 course had a significant positive impact on the first-year retention rate. The results also revealed that students who participated in both ENGR194 and SBP (C-Group 1) made changes to their declared majors earlier than students who had only taken ENGR 123 or neither of the courses (C-Groups 2 and 3 respectively). Furthermore, students in C-Group 1 received better grades in math and science than their peers, and students in C-Groups 1 and 2 had significantly higher GPAs than their peers in C-Group 3.