Retention Through Coop

ABSTRACT

Northeastern University, partner institution in the Northeast Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (NE-LSAMP) will conduct an engineering educational research study that investigates the hypothesis that participation in experiential education programs, such as formal cooperative education (co-op), internships and research experiences for undergraduates (REUs), supplemented by mentorships, leads to enhanced self-efficacy, augmented learning, and an increased likelihood of retention, particularly among minority students who are historically under-represented in engineering. Each of the five universities in the alliance will participate in the study. The institutions are: Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Connecticut, University of Rhode Island and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. These alliance institutions have formally established research experiences for undergraduates, with only one of the universities having a formal cooperative education program.

One of the reasons for the persisting low percentage of engineering professionals among minorities is their attrition in undergraduate engineering majors. A promising approach to retaining undergraduate minority students is the provision of programs that allow students to gain work experience (referred to as Practice-Oriented Experiential Education or POEE). Such approaches are becoming increasingly relevant in a work culture characterized by the need to continuously reflect and learn from on-going experience. This study will investigate whether POEE is a critical predictor of historically underrepresented students' STEM learning and retention through its impact on self-efficacy. It will also examine whether an enriched form of POEE (peer mentoring) significantly increases the effect of experiential education on self-efficacy, learning, and retention.

The proposed study will have broader implications for undergraduate engineering programs to have formal support systems in place, as in the case of the NSF LSAMPs. In addition to the contributions to research in the fields of psychology, social cognitive career theory, and experiential education, this project has a number of broader impacts that have national implications. These national implications are as follows: (1) The research results will provide engineering colleges with data-supported measures of the effectiveness of POEE programs on historically underrepresented minority students. By empirically tracking the effectiveness of these contextual supports, the study will make it possible for engineering colleges to emphasize programs that work. (2) The study will assess the value of formal POEE programs and identify features which can be replicated at other universities, using the methods created through this study. (3) The use of cleaned retention data will create a means for comparison across the five partnering schools, and since one of them represents a significant percentage of engineering cooperative education, the new retention data has the potential to contribute to defining a new parameter. (4) The prominence of the role of self-efficacy in this study will help to determine if it merits inclusion as one of the most critical explanations of academic outcomes, in this case, the outcomes of learning and retention among underrepresented minority engineering undergraduates. (6) This project will seek to build on the newly validated measure of work self-efficacy introduced by Joe Raelin, the Asa Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education in the "Pathways to Self Efficacy and Retention of Women In Undergraduate Engineering" research study currently underway, which could impact future national studies involving learning outcomes from work experience. (7) The model has the potential to become a standard that can be replicated with other populations (such as students with disabilities), with other educational levels (such as graduate studies), or among multiple areas of education beyond engineering (such as the physical sciences).

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Related Departments:Mechanical & Industrial Engineering