Search for: All records

At California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona, CPP), two gatekeeper courses for the undergraduate students in the Civil Engineering program have been identified as Statics and Mechanics of Materials. Our university’s Civil Engineering Department is the largest undergraduate CE Department in the nation with approximately 1,600 students, graduating 15% of California’s Civil Engineers. Identifying sources of students’ struggles and proposing effective interventions to support students’ success is crucial. As these two gatekeeper courses serve as prerequisites to many engineering courses, low performance in these courses contributes to a large dropout rate, delayed graduation, and continued poor performance in subsequent courses. To understand students’ struggles, historical data between Fall 2018 to Spring 2022 was examined, including: (a) failure rates for the gatekeeper courses, (b) achievement gaps (the difference between under-represented minority students (URM) and non-URM students), and (c) the correlation between students’ grades in the gatekeeper courses compared to their upper division engineering courses. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify proven best practices for improving student performance in STEM disciplines. The literature highlights the effectiveness of targeted interventions, as follows: (1) prepare all students for success in the gatekeeper courses and close the achievement gaps, through a Summer Bridge Program, (2) improve the students’ performance in Statics, Mechanics of Materials, and subsequent courses, and reduce Time-to-Degree, and (3) address variability in teaching between all instructors through training workshops. This paper provides a review of interventions utilized to write a proposal to request funding to agencies such as National Science Foundation and offers actionable insights for educators seeking to reduce failure rates, close achievement gaps, and standardize instructional quality across courses.