Encouraging Civil Engineering Retention by Increasing Community and Self-Efficacy

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With funding from the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, the "Encouraging Civil Engineering Retention by Increasing Community and Self-Efficacy" project will support high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at The Citadel in South Carolina. Throughout its five years, this project will fund twenty scholarships for students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in Civil Engineering. The project will also provide boot camp stipends for entering scholars, as well as summer stipends and travel support for continuing scholars. The project will seek to address the need to increase the number of STEM graduates with bachelor degrees in civil engineering. A diverse pool of civil engineers is significant for ensuring public safety and the efficient movement of people and goods, to support a robust economy. This project aims to meet this need by recruiting students to civil engineering, particularly students who are outside of the traditional pools of engineering talent. The project has the potential to increase the diversity of the civil engineering workforce and may bring new perspectives to the civil engineering process itself. It also has the potential to produce new insights into the impacts that changes to pedagogy and course sequencing have on student performance, self-efficacy, and persistence.The goal of this S-STEM Track 2 project is to encourage persistence of diverse, high-achieving, low-income students in civil engineering. Project objectives include attaining 85% persistence in civil engineering and 75% persistence within the two S-STEM cohorts. Each cohort of ten students will form a student academic community of practice. Cohort members will be scheduled in the same courses, assigned to common dormitories, and participate together in co-curricular seminars. Prior to their first and second years, students will live on campus and complete Calculus I and Calculus II in sections restricted to S-STEM students. During their second year of study, students will complete Chemistry I and II in small, active-learning sections. Professional mentorship, research, and internship opportunities will be provided to enhance students' self-efficacy. The project aims to study the impacts of the interventions on student self-efficacy, retention, and performance using validated instruments and follow-up focus groups and interviews. The project has the potential to develop theoretically grounded and empirically verified best practices for retention of low-income, high-performing engineering 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.