The Wise Summer Bridge Program: Assessing Student Attrition, Retention, And Program Effectiveness

Abstract

For participating university programs, summer bridge outreach has helped to significantly increase student retention in academic majors. For female engineering students, bridge programs not only serve an academic need, but also serve to foster networking relationships between students prior to starting the semester. The Women in Applied Science and Engineering (WISE) Summer Bridge Program was designed to prepare incoming female students for the transition from high school to the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). Since 1998, this program has offered academic reviews in courses such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In addition, computer-based curricula have been offered in Maple, Excel, and HTML to better prepare students for their freshmen introductory engineering courses.

Operationalizing and monitoring student support in undergraduate engineering education

“…The purpose of this paper is to explore how to operationalize and measure student support in STEM-considering which supports transcend engineering and science boundaries and which supports are unique to the engineering context. The traditional approach to monitoring student support is to evaluate the impact of individual interventions (Newton et al, 2001;Samuelson et al, 2014;Single et al, 2005); however, in this paper, we flip this logic. Rather than focusing on specific offices or interventions, we focus on the STEM learning environment more holistically.…”

Toward a Measurement of Co-Curricular Support: Insights from an Exploratory Factor Analysis

“…For the development of an item bank, we leveraged the theoretical constructs of the MCCS along with responses collected from students using open-ended surveys along each of the six dimensions of institutional support. This primary round of instrument development allowed us to create a set of items that spanned the full set of theoretical dimensions of student support and to adjust the wording used for each item based on students' feedback; we then began the process for establishing content and face validity for the instrument [11].…”

A Comparative Analysis of Support Perceptions between Transfer and First-Time-in-College Students in Engineering, Science, and Mathematics Programs

“…The purpose of this quantitative paper is to explore the differential perceptions of support between transfer and first-time-in-college (FTIC) undergraduate engineering students using the STEM-SPSI. The existing body of research on student support mostly focused on the effect of specific interventions or student support resources, such as a program within the diversity support office [12]- [14]. However, this study seeks to make this comparison considering perceptions of different kinds of supports captured via 12 constructs identified in the STEM-SPSI.…”