Execution Details and Assessment Results of a Summer Bridge Program for Engineering Freshmen

Abstract

Dr. Darabi is an ABET IDEAL Scholar and has led the MIE Department ABET team in two successful accreditations (2008 and 2014) of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering programs. Dr. Darabi has been the lead developer of several educational software systems as well as the author of multiple educational reports and papers. Dr. Darabi's research group uses Big Data, process mining, data mining, Operations Research, high performance computing, and visualization techniques to achieve its research and educational goals. Dr. Darabi's research has been funded by multiple federal and corporate sponsors including the National Science Foundation,

Engineering Strong Bridges: Review of College Bridge Programs

“…The size of the cohorts also varied among the programs and institutions. The smallest programs had 20 students or fewer (e.g., [29,12], while the largest programs enrolled over 100 students each year (e.g., [8,6]). The most common size of programs was between 20 and 40 students per year; this could have been due to the specific student population or due to issues of scaling, and was not commonly discussed in the literature.…”

“…The academic content also included specific items relevant to the needs identified by the various institutions, which were a function of the academic programs at the institutions as well as the student body and its needs, and have varied over time. These included a strong focus on biology preparation in one case [10,11], computer programming skills [1,12], integrated science, physics, or chemistry [3,28,24], introduction to engineering [34], and CAD [12]. An overview of the content is given in Table 2, showing the most common components in some typical programs.…”

Implementation of an Introductory Engineering Course and its Impact on Students’ Academic Success and Retention

“…Various other studies showed that specific educational problems can also be addressed by targeted interventions. For instance, helping first-year students with the college transition [4] [5], closing achievement gaps for racial/ethnic minority students [6] [7], motivating students to pursue science careers [8] [9], enhancing student learning outcomes [10] [11], promoting STEM career among women [12], and psychological processes relevant to the problem [13] [14] are all examples of targeted interventions.…”

“…Its topics include math and science discussion groups, entrepreneurship challenge, four-year graduation plan development, time and stress management, undergraduate research projects and internships, discussions on how to select a major, engineering identity, math applications in engineering, and course evaluations. Combinatorial enrollment in ENGR194 and a previously described program only for S-STEM scholars (the Summer Bridge Program -SBP) [4] was used to define three comparison-groups (C-Groups) of students for comparative assessment. Various metrics such as the percentage of students who dropped out the university, the math and science grades in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019, the average cumulative GPA, and the average number of semesters until students change their major inside the College of Engineering or to a non-engineering major are compared between C-Groups.…”

DEI Student Ambassadors Program

“…Nazempour et al report about a program where student ambassadors took a role of peer mentors for new students participating in a summer bridge program [5]. Similarly, in [6], the authors describe a student ambassador program that supported recruitment of new students and peer-mentoring of current students.…”