Assessing Impact of Teaching, Advising and Mentoring on Students in the Enterprise Program

Michigan Technological University, Houghton MI

Investigators

Abstract

This exploratory project will measure and explain the impact of quality teaching, advising, and mentoring on Enterprise students at Michigan Tech, with particular focus on student retention in engineering majors, graduation rates, and career intentions. Recent data shows a substantially higher six-year graduation rates for Enterprise students compared to non-Enterprise students, the hypothesis of this project is that the high quality teaching, advising, and mentoring efforts of Enterprise faculty have had a significant and measurable impact on students? graduation rates and career success. The research will produce a completed study that documents evaluation methods and results and suggests practical applications of the knowledge gained from the project to the improvement of engineering education. It will also create a model that recommends methods and metrics for assessing the impact of teaching, advising, and mentoring on student retention in engineering, graduation, career intentions, and other outcomes. The project will utilize a variety of evaluation methods to study students enrolled in the Enterprise program and will use non-Enterprise engineering students as a control group. Since the impacts of teaching, advising, and mentoring are not typically susceptible to the kinds of metrics used to measure research accomplishments, a model that can directly measure quality in the classroom and its impact on student outcomes would be potentially transformative. The results of this research can help strengthen the business of engineering education by offering new evidence of the importance of teaching excellence, the impact of curriculum innovation, and the contribution of faculty who advise and mentor students, especially in active, applied learning environments such as Enterprise. This is valuable information for recruiting engineering students, for designing programs that retain engineering and other STEM students, and for attracting sustainable industry support for an active-learning curriculum.