Research: Staying the course: Understanding the motivational factors contributing to persistence among undergraduate engineering students in online courses

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This study will investigate the factors that motivate undergraduate engineering students enrolled in online courses to complete the courses, rather than drop out. Online courses have become an increasingly utilized and important instructional method in undergraduate engineering education. The online format can provide educational opportunities to students who otherwise may not have access and, therefore, has the potential to positively affect the size and makeup of the nation's engineering workforce. However, students in online courses drop out of these courses at greater rates than those in more traditional, face-to-face courses. The proposed work will utilize the online undergraduate engineering degree programs at Arizona State University to generate a model that describes and predicts course-level persistence based on the following types of data: attributes of individual students, tracking data that shows where and when students click within their online course learning management system, and information about the online courses themselves. The immediate impact of the work will be an increased understanding of the reasons that undergraduate engineering students choose to stay in or drop online courses. In the longer term, the findings will also contribute to efforts that support a greater percentage of online undergraduate engineering students successfully completing their degree programs.During the project, a Model of Online Course-level Persistence in Engineering grounded in theories of student motivation and online and undergraduate engineering student persistence will be developed and empirically evaluated. The project proposes three studies. The Student Experiences Study uses a longitudinal, within-person approach to investigate how undergraduate engineering students' experiences in their online course influence their beliefs about their likelihood of success in the course, their perceptions of the value of the course, their level of engagement in the course, and their ultimate decision to complete the course. The Learning Management System Interaction Study applies the learner-based technique of associative classification to historical data from online undergraduate engineering courses at Arizona State University to describe students' patterns of engagement with their online course learning management system as they relate to course-level persistence. The final Persistence Modeling Study generates a unified measure of course engagement from these patterns. This measure will be used in a longitudinal structural equation modeling analysis that compares three variations on the model of online course-level persistence: (1) a variation in which engagement is included as a partial mediator of the relationships between expectancies of course success, course task values, perceptions of course characteristics, and course-level persistence, (2) a variation in which engagement is conceptualized as a full mediator of the relationships between expectancies of course success, course task values, perceptions of course characteristics, and persistence to course completion, and (3) a variation in which engagement is not included at all.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.