Understanding Our Students: A Longitudinal‐Study of Success and Failure in Engineering With Implications for Increased Retention

TLDR

Despite extensive research on engineering student retention, the factors influencing students’ decisions to stay and their ability to perform remain poorly understood, especially regarding how curricular experiences interact with learning styles, habits, and attitudes. This study aims to deepen educators’ insight into the underlying factors contributing to engineering student retention. By tracking 1,000 engineering students over their first three years, the authors compiled a comprehensive database of academic and non‑academic characteristics, successes, and failures. The identified traits corroborate many prior findings and uncover new relationships that could be crucial for designing educational environments that better prepare engineers for future success.

Abstract

Abstract In spite of considerable research about the poor retention rate of undergraduate engineering students, we still have an inadequate understanding of the factors that affect students' decisions to remain in engineering programs and their ability to perform well enough to be retained. Although continued study is needed of external factors such as curricular requirements, admissions criteria, and test scores, we also need to know much more about the relationships between curricular experiences and students' learning styles, habits, and attitudes. The work presented in this paper was designed to enhance educators' understanding of the factors that underlie the concern about student retention in engineering. By observing 1,000 engineering students during their first three years in college, the research team generated a large database on the students' academic and non‐academic characteristics as well as their successes and failures. The traits discovered not only support many findings from previous studies but also reveal some new relationships that could prove essential to designing an educational environment that will prepare engineers for success in the future.