2008-investigating-the-critical-mass-of-women-and-minorities-in-engineering-using-longitudinal-student-records

Describing the Pathways of Students Continuing in and Leaving Engineering Matthew W.. Long, Purdue University, Engineering Education and Richard A.. Layton, Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech

Describing the Pathways of Students Continuing in and Leaving Engineering

Matthew W Ohland, Russell A Long, Purdue University, Engineering Education

and Richard A Layton, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

The most comprehensive research on STEM student pathways was published by Xie and

Shauman, who studied STEM pathways (and particularly gender differences in those pathways) from early qualification and expression of interest in college study, pursuit of college study, persistence to graduation, pursuit of a career, and career persistence The aim of this research

is to study the college pathway in greater detail, breaking down that pathway into smaller, discrete sections of the pipeline that describe other critical transitions at which students (both female and male) are likely to choose to leave the pathway

The Multiple Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD), records of the academic pathways of over 135,000 engineering students enrolled from 1987-2005 at nine public universities in the southeastern United States will be used to answer these research questions:

 What transition points are the most significant in describing the engineering student pathway?

 How many students follow each pathway—particularly the pathways that lead to an engineering degree?

 How are the pathways that students choose and the success students have in those pathways influenced

by their race and gender?

An early MIDFIELD model

(shown at right) hypothesized

some critical transitions in the

engineering pathway, but this

model was too simplistic to

model some significant

differences in curricula at

different institutions Further,

this model did not account for

some common student behaviors A new model will be presented along with preliminary findings from this work Another special contribution of this work will be the presentation of evolving attempts to develop methods to display this unique quantitative information

This work is sponsored in part by NSF award STEP-0729596, “Studies using the Multiple-Institution Database For Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD),” Principal

Investigator: Matthew W Ohland

Succeed First college

math course

Engineering core courses Succeed

Fail

Persist Students who do not persist

Fail

Engineering gateway courses

First-time in college students admitted to engineering programs

Succeed

Persist

Fail Persist

Transfer students admitted to engineering programs

Students who graduate in engineering programs