Identifying and Validating Interactive and Uncommon Characteristics of Retention and Success in Engineering Education

Identifying and Validating Interactive and Uncommon Characteristics of Retention and Success in Engineering Education Identifying and Validating Interactive and Uncommon Characteristics of Retention and Success in Engineering Education The focal area of this Level I project is Broadening Participation in STEM. This project aims to fill in three gaps in the current state of knowledge about engineering retention and success: 1) lack of knowledge about engineering retention and success characteristics based on interactive, concurrent effects of multiple factors, 2) lack of knowledge about engineering retention and success characteristics based on the modeling of variable relations that exist for some but not all values of variables or are different for different value ranges of variables, and 3) lack of knowledge about uncommon engineering retention and success characteristics of outlier students who do not fall into common characteristics of engineering retention and success. This project will employ the new Partial-Value Association Discovery (PVAD) algorithm to identify: 1) common characteristics of engineering retention and success, and 2) uncommon characteristics of engineering retention and success for outlier students who do not fall into common student profiles of engineering retention and success, based on both individual and interactive effects of various variables covering both partial-value and all-value associations of variables. Hence, new findings from this project will enrich the understanding and knowledge of engineering retention and success, in comparison with existing findings based on effects of individual variables and all-value variable relations. The intervention with an engineering counselling and tracking program to help students development of the newly identified engineering retention and success characteristics will be developed and implemented. The intervention effects on students will be observed and analyzed to validate the new findings of engineering retention and success characteristics. The identification and validation of new engineering retention and success characteristics will provide guidelines to help more students achieve engineering retention and success across the nation, thus broadening the participation of more students in engineering fields.