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1. Measuring Predictors of Persistence: An Instrument for First-Year Engineering Students

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--60111  

   Currey, Matthew; Cruz, Juan; Mallouk, Kaitlin; Farrell, Stephanie; Major, Justin (June 2026, ASEE Conferences)

   This project is part of a multi-year NSF-SSTEM intervention that seeks to increase graduation rates among engineering students, with a focus on low-income, academically talented engineering students. We created a first-year early intervention grounded in Tinto’s conceptual model of student motivation and persistence. This model defines the four contributors to students' motivation to persist in higher education as clarity of goals, self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and perceived curriculum relevance. In alignment with this framework, our interventions include scholarships, an Engineering Learning Community (ELC) to foster peer connections, mentorship programs, personal and professional development seminars, and inclusive practices integrated into first-year engineering lab courses. Together, these efforts aim to promote academic and social integration for first-year engineering students, thereby increasing their likelihood of persistence and graduation. In the first phase of the project, we developed and validated a survey instrument to measure whether these interventions influenced students’ experiences in ways consistent with Tinto’s model. Data collected in 2023 and 2024 from over 400 first-year engineering students at a four-year institution in the Northeastern U.S. underwent exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. We found that the four predictors of persistence can be measured using six interrelated factors: (1) comfort with the professor, (2) sense of belonging, (3) engineering identity, (4) goals and intent to pursue, (5) test/assignment confidence, and (6) diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) components. Preliminary results provided promising validity evidence, though not all factors performed equally well. Comfort with professor emerged as a strong and stable construct, demonstrating high reliability across Cronbach’s alpha, McDonald’s omega, and Average Variance Extracted (AVE). Engineering identity also showed robust performance on these metrics. By contrast, the remaining four factors did not meet the desired benchmarks for internal consistency reliability and convergent validity. These findings highlighted the need to strengthen the instrument prior to broader implementation and generalization. The present study builds on this foundation with the explicit goal of strengthening validity evidence. To do so, we added targeted survey items to reinforce weaker constructs, thereby improving reliability metrics. We collected 363 responses from the current (2025-2026) cohort of first-year engineering students to increase statistical power and refine factor estimates. Finally, guided by Tinto’s framework and refined through input from students and faculty in our program, we introduced additional items that may establish a seventh factor: curriculum relevance. These items are likely to measure how students perceive the connection between coursework and their academic or career goals, a critical dimension of persistence not fully captured in the original instrument. The central research question guiding this study is: What is the internal reliability and convergent validity of our new enhanced instrument and how does it compare to the previous instrument? By addressing this question, we expect to enhance our instrument, enabling a more rigorous evaluation of first-year support interventions. In doing so, the project not only evaluates the effectiveness of our NSF-SSTEM program but also provides a model for institutions seeking evidence-based strategies to improve retention and graduation among first year engineering students. 

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2. Enhancing STEM Degree Completion: A Framework for the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CAM) Scholarship Project

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47314  

   Jaafar, Israd; Jensen, Matthew; Tolman, Sean; Bordelon, Amanda; Willardson, Bennington; Raje, Janis (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   This paper presents the practical framework for implementing the Civil and Mechanical Engineering (CAM) Scholarship project, using a recently received grant from the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (NSF-S-STEM) program. This project is focused on supporting the retention and degree completion of low-income, and high-achieving students with proven financial need in the Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs at the College of Engineering and Technology (CET) at the University. The University is an open-admissions public institution of higher education with a dual mission model that aims to combine the resources and rigor of a major university yet keep the accessibility of a community college. The institution’s student body is markedly different than those at research focused institutions: 37% are first generation, 80% work while enrolled, 30% are over 25 years old, and only 48% are full-time students. These circumstances create challenges in degree completion, leading to high attrition rates at the university level. The overall retention rate is 65%, the typical 4-year undergraduate graduation rate is only 13%, and the 6-year graduation rate is 29%. Specific to the Mechanical and Civil Engineering programs, the first-year retention rate for students starting in 2020 was 64%. Students cited several reasons for leaving, with 35% reporting that they are unable to afford college. Although a 2020 Institutional Research study found that scholarships are the most effective form of financial aid to increase persistence, CET has few dedicated scholarships to award students. Furthermore, the few scholarships available in the college are based on merit and do not factor in low-income and other factors that lead to attrition. This project aims to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income and high-achieving students. This project also seeks to advance understanding about the effect of evidence-based, context-specific interventions to ensure success for STEM program students in open-admissions universities. The framework of this project is to study and address several institutionally identified attrition points in the XXX that includes: (i) high attrition of first- and second-year students, (ii) slow pace of students to matriculation into the Civil and Mechanical Engineering programs, and (iii) low participation and completion rates of women, underrepresented minorities, and first-generation students. In addition to the scholarship award, several approaches have been identified for implementation to support scholarship recipients’ success: (i) Multi-layered Mentoring, (ii) Social and Academic Support via an active, collaborative, and inclusive cohorts, (iii) Professional Preparation, and (iv) High Impact Practices. This project can be used to inform other institutions with similar populations and/or concerns on impactful programs, practices, and interventions that are most impactful for students. This paper provides the framework of what will be implemented in the CAM Scholarship project. 

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3. WIP: Engineering Persistence: A Support System for Students in Financial Need to Succeed

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE61694.2024.10892992  

   Riley, Abagael; Cruz, Juan; Mallouk, Kaitlin (October 2024, IEEE)

   Engineering graduates have significant opportunities for meaningful careers and social mobility, yet there needs to be more support for financially disadvantaged, academically gifted students. To improve these circumstances, we have introduced the Engineering Persistence project, an NSF-funded S-STEM scholarship program, at Rowan University. This project provides a group of students, selected by financial need and academic talent, with scholarships up to 10,000 USD per year, depending on financial need. In addition to these scholarships, we integrated a support system that includes interventions to support first-year engineering students’ social and professional growth in their degree plans. We include in this paper the data collection and analysis process for the first year of this project, including the administration of the pre-survey, and the exploratory factor analysis conducted on the resulting data. This work in progress research paper aims to validate an instrument to assess the impact of an integrated support system on students’ persistence in Rowan’s engineering students. 

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4. Board 330: Iron Range Engineering Academic Scholarships for Co-Op Based Engineering Education

   Spence, Catherine M. Siverling (June 2023, Review directory American Society for Engineering Education)

   This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Over its six year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 120 unique full-time students who are pursuing Bachelor of Science degrees in engineering. First semester junior, primarily transfer, students at Iron Range Engineering will receive scholarships for one semester. The Iron Range Engineering (IRE) STEM Scholars Program provides a financially sustainable pathway for students across the nation to graduate with an engineering degree and up to two years of industry experience. Students typically complete their first two years of engineering coursework at community colleges across the country. Students then join IRE and spend one transitional semester gaining training and experience to equip them with the technical, design, and professional skills needed to succeed in the engineering workforce. During the last two years of their education, IRE students work in industry, earning an engineering intern salary, while being supported in their technical and professional development by professors, learning facilitators, and their own peers. The IRE STEM Scholars project will provide access to a financially responsible engineering degree for low-income students by financially supporting them during the transitional semester, which has two financial challenges: university tuition costs are higher than their previous community college costs, and the semester occurs before they are able to earn an engineering co-op income. In addition, the project will provide personalized mentorship throughout students’ pathway to graduation, such as weekly conversations with a mentor. By providing these supports, the IRE STEM Scholars project aims to prepare students to be competitive applicants for the engineering workforce with career development and engineering co-op experience. Because community colleges draw relatively representative proportions of students from a variety of backgrounds, this project has the potential to learn how transfer pathways and co-op education can support financially sustainable pathways to engineering degrees for a more diverse group of students and contribute to the development of a diverse, competitive engineering workforce. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. As part of the scope of this project, a concurrent mixed-methods research study will be done on engineering students’ thriving, specifically their identity, belonging, motivation, and overall wellbeing (or mental and physical health). Student outcomes have previously been measured primarily through academic markers such as graduation rates and GPA. In addition to these outcomes, this project explores ways to better support overall student thriving. This study will address the following research questions: How do undergraduate students’ engineering identity and belongingness develop over time in a co-op-based engineering program? How do undergraduate students’ motivation and identity connect to overall wellbeing in a co-op-based engineering program? In the first year of the IRE STEM Scholars Project, initial interview data describe scholars’ sense of belonging in engineering, prior to their first co-op experiences and survey data describe IRE students’ experiences in co-op and overall sense of belonging. Future work will utilize these values to identify ways to better support the IRE STEM scholars’ identity development as they move into their first co-op experiences. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students. 

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5. S-STEM First Year Progress: Baylor Engineering and Computer Science Scholar's Program

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42065  

   Thompson, Michael; Spence, Anne; Skurla, Carolyn; Sandvall, Emily; Pouso_Morales, Andrea (August 2022, ASEE Conferences)

   This paper reports first-year progress of the Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) Scholars Program at Baylor University, an NSF S-STEM project supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need pursuing B.S. degrees in Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science. Over five years the project funds four-year scholarships for 22 students across two cohorts of 11, paired with orientation, a seminar series, required faculty mentoring, peer and alumni mentoring, undergraduate research support, professional development, and tutoring. A distinguishing feature is the use of EAB's Navigate platform for tracking student progress, coordinating care, and applying predictive analytics to inform timely interventions. The project also investigates how student perceptions of success factors align with those attributed by faculty/mentors and predictive analytics, and whether such "big data" tools are perceived as helpful. First-year accomplishments are reported across recruitment (adapted for COVID-19), Navigate setup, scholar orientation and activities, and a qualitative research study examining student fit, institutional fit, and student identity, with progress mapped to each project objective. 

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