Coaching and Retention for Engineering Students: Improving Low-Income Student Success in Engineering with Innovative Mentoring and Early Internship Experiences

Coastal Carolina University, Conway SC

Investigators

Abstract

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 Coastal Carolina University, a public comprehensive liberal arts institution located in Conway, South Carolina. Over its 6-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 11 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Engineering Science. First-year students will receive up to four years of scholarship support. The project aims to increase student persistence and degree attainment in engineering by linking scholarships with effective supporting activities, including summer bridge courses, mentoring, and early professional engineering experiences. With the help of a tailored first-year curriculum and mentor coaching, the scholars will obtain employment in industry as engineering interns during their summer term as rising sophomores. Scholars will receive job-site mentoring from practicing engineers at the project’s industry partners who will provide and supervise internship experiences. The project will investigate improved practices in mentoring, assessment and evaluation of curriculum improvements, and effective mechanisms for industry feedback into higher education curricula. Because the Engineering Science program at Coastal Carolina University has a high population of underrepresented students, this project has the potential to broaden participation in engineering and to learn how mentoring and early internship experiences support retention and graduation of this student population. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Towards this end the project team will pursue three specific aims. First is to accommodate developmental math-ready engineering students using a two-course summer bridge program, integrating a math boot camp and an engineering graphics course, linked by a fun, skills-focused, exploratory rapid-prototyping design project. Second is to enhance student academic success through a program of mentoring focused on self-regulated learning strategies. Third, and finally, is to confer self-efficacy and motivational benefits accruing to degree completion, through a culminating, early engineering internship experience. This project will investigate the effects of summer bridge courses, mentoring, and early internship experiences on students’ self-efficacy and outcomes expectations, interest, and satisfaction in engineering, in the framework of Social Cognitive Career Theory. This project will investigate the factors in these project interventions that result in high satisfaction and persistence to degree completion for low-income students in engineering. Evaluation of the project will be conducted in light of Social Cognitive Career Theory. Mentoring reports, internship cover letters, workplace competency assessments, student interviews, and Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaires will be analyzed for benefits to students' motivational profiles and views of engineering and institutional data will be examined for impacts on Engineering program progression and completion. Results will be made available by a project page with the Open Science Framework, where all relevant project materials will be stored and publicly available. 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. 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.