Research: Predicting Achievement and Improving Equity in Engineering Using Contextualized High School Performance

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to improve the number of well-qualified women, low-income students, and students of color who pursue and obtain postsecondary engineering degrees. Previous NSF-funded research showed that the use of contextualized high school performance in engineering admissions has the potential to increase the number of women, low-income students, and students of color in engineering. Yet surprisingly little is known about how contextualized high school performance relates to student success in engineering. The research that exists, however, suggests that doing well in high school compared to your peers has predictive validity above and beyond the student’s raw credentials. This project will solve significant data, design, and methodological challenges to investigate this question. This project will create a unique dataset drawn from state unit-record data and data from institutional inventories of ABET-accredited engineering programs within that state. The project directly addresses research on the transition from high school to four-year college/university. This project is expected to increase the admittance of underrepresented students into engineering degree programs. Prior research has shown that both admissions offices and national actors are open to changes that support equity and fairness. The research will inform future efforts to improve equity in college admissions, such as the College Board’s Landscape, which has been implemented in over 150 colleges in 2019-2020. This project has the potential to inform not only practices in engineering admissions offices, but also the activities of important national actors such as the College Board, the Coalition for College Access, and Common Application. In this project, this team will investigate the following research questions: Are contextualized high school GPAs and test scores more predictive of engineering outcomes than raw GPAs? Is there a relationship between taking a rigorous high school curriculum and successful engineering outcomes? Are there heterogenous effects for low-income students, underrepresented minority students, and women in engineering? The hypothesis is that students with higher contextualized achievement, either through either contextualized GPAs, SATs, or curriculum selection, will be more likely to succeed in engineering programs, even after conditioning on raw achievement, and that effects will be stronger for women, low-income students, and students of color. This project will utilize unique student unit-record data from the Michigan Department of Education and the Michigan Education Data Center, allowing examination of outcomes for state residents at 15 public ABET-accredited institutions. This study will use quantile regression techniques, which will enable researchers to test the relationship between an independent variable and the entire distribution of a dependent variable, usually divided into quantiles. This technique will be very helpful for this project, where there may be substantial differences in causes and effects across outcomes like first-year GPA and college graduation, rather than simply focusing on the means for those variables. The results will be disseminated through policy briefs, research publications, and work with national leaders on college admissions and engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.