Research Initiation: Influence of self-efficacy and social support on persistence and achievement in chemical engineering sophomores

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This research initiation project will help students more successfully navigate the challenging chemical engineering curriculum. Specifically, the project will focus on the sophomore year since this is when many students struggle and potentially leave chemical engineering programs. By administering surveys to students at the beginning and end of their sophomore year and tracking their academic performance in courses, the project team will determine the factors that influence student achievement and persistence in chemical engineering. This project will also test whether student participation in a 2-day voluntary workshop (“ChemE Camp”) - which includes team-building exercises, lab tours, a hands-on project, presentations about upcoming courses and the curriculum, and interactions with upper-level students and faculty - can impact these factors and ultimately improve student achievement and persistence in chemical engineering. Though designed for chemical engineering, the methods involved in this study and the design of the workshop are adaptable and could easily be tailored to other disciplines. Likewise, these findings can be applied more broadly to other disciplines in science and engineering to improve student retention, leading to an increase in the number of engineering graduates entering the workforce. Much of the significant attrition from chemical engineering programs occurs in the sophomore year when students first begin to take major-specific courses. To address this issue, this project will explore the impact of the Social Cognitive Career Theory constructs of self-efficacy and contextual influences (specifically, social support) on the achievement and persistence of chemical engineering sophomores. Surveys given to students at the beginning and end of their sophomore year will use scales from published instruments to assess students' chemical engineering self-efficacy, coping self-efficacy, level of social and academic integration, and intent to persist. These results will be combined with academic performance data for sophomore-level chemical engineering courses to test the relationships between the factors of self-efficacy and social support and the outcomes of academic performance and persistence. Additionally, the effects of an intervention on students' self-efficacy and social support will be tested. The intervention is a voluntary two-day workshop ("ChemE Camp") offered to students just prior to the start of the sophomore year. The workshop includes activities expected to increase students' self-efficacy and social support. The effects of these factors on student achievement and persistence are well-established in first-year engineering and other introductory STEM courses, but the impact of these factors on later courses has received much less attention. Given the high levels of attrition in early major-specific barrier courses, studies specific to sophomore students are worthy of further investigation. This sophomore student cohort is a logical next opportunity for improving overall student retention and the professional formation of engineers for the workforce. Since the workshop activities are based on broad themes (team-building, integration with upper-level students, informal interaction with faculty, etc.), they could easily be adapted to create similar workshops for other STEM disciplines and at other institutions. The results of this study will be disseminated to the engineering education community via publications in relevant journals and presentations at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference, and to the larger body of practitioners via the creation of short videos describing the observed benefits of the camp and instructions on how to create and adapt a similar camp at other institutions.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.