Studying Undergraduate Curricular Complexity for Engineering Student Success (SUCCESS)

University Of Cincinnati Main Campus, Cincinnati OH

Investigators

Abstract

As the demand for engineering graduates grows, there has been mounting interest in understanding what prevents students from completing their degrees. Not everyone follows the same pathway to an engineering degree; current longitudinal research suggests that subpopulations of students take different routes to either completing or abandoning their studies. Accordingly, the BPE program seeks to support research on understanding systematic barriers that push out students from underserved communities. This project will examine a barrier that all students must overcome when pursuing an engineering degree, the curriculum itself. An emerging framework called Curricular Analytics has provided a new method of thinking about how curricula in engineering can be analyzed. The framework quantifies features of the curriculum that make it “complex” such that they can be connected to outcomes like graduation rates. This project will use a longitudinal dataset called the Multi-Institution Database for Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), which contains nearly two million records from undergraduate students at 21 U.S. universities from 1987 through 2018 – 14.4 % of which are engineering students. Using these data, student course-taking trajectories will be created, clustered to find patterns based on measures of curricular complexity and compared to established curricula across engineering disciplines, then disaggregated into subpopulations. This project has the potential to empower administrators, curriculum designers, and advisors to understand how the complexity of the curriculum as defined by faculty and students’ deviances from it affects the success of different subpopulations of students. The project will use the perspective of curricular complexity to examine what kinds of programs such as first year experiences, enrollment models, and course sequencing that support the retention and graduation of different subpopulations of students. To explore what barriers curricular factors impose on different students, the Curricular Analytics framework’s measures will be applied to capture a curriclum’s sequencing and interconnectedness quantitatively and study diverse student pathways - both as codified and as experienced. The guiding research question is: what is the variation in curricular complexity among the following strata – institutions, disciplines, matriculation models, populations, and pathways – and to what extent does curricular complexity relate to outcomes for diverse population subgroups? This project will combine curricular complexity with student outcomes and course-taking data from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD) to understand curricular factors in broadening participation in engineering, including retention and degree completion. This project will involve creating trajectories from student course-taking data using association analysis. The curricular complexity for these trajectories will be calculated and disaggregated across the strata of interest. These new data will be used to explore how curricular complexity for ecosystem metrics like discipline stickiness and migration yield are related to the complexity of a curriculum. The combination of the MIDFIELD database with the curricular complexity framework can bring a new perspective on differences in longitudinal studies on engineering student degree attainment and retention in the context of broadening participation. Currently, curricular complexity is a nascent framework with descriptive and explanatory potential, such as correlating program quality with curricular complexity measures. The empirical results can directly inform future curriculum revisions and policy efforts at the studied institutions through unique reports delivered to the appropriate administrative stakeholders. By disseminating these results directly to institutional stakeholders, The project will leverage MIDFIELD’s potential for disaggregation to impact inclusion efforts of underrepresented students in engineering at the curricular and programmatic level. 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.