Research and Instructional Strategies for Engineering Retention - RISER

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The project focuses on two at-risk first-year engineering student populations: (1) those that do not qualify for the first-year engineering fundamentals due to low scores on the ACT math test and on the institution's math placement test and (2) women in the honors program. On average, these at-risk students comprise a third of the entering class and the program intends to increase the first-to-second-year retention for the low math score group from 45% to 70% and for the women honor students from 72% to 93% in order to increase the graduation rate by 10%. Interventions for the students with low math score include special sections of precalculus, block scheduling, living learning communities, and summer bridge programs; interventions for the women honors students include research assistantships at the University and at the Oak Ridge National Lab and mentoring through an organized extracurricular program. The evaluation effort, which is being conducted by an experienced outside consultant, is assessing the project's effectiveness in reaching targeted students and the project's impact in achieving preliminary indicators and benchmarks and ultimately its overall goals. Broader impacts include the focus on two at-risk populations that contain a disproportionate fraction of students from underrepresented groups.