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 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? First-time in college Transfer students admitted to An early MIDFIELD model students admitted to engineering programs (shown at right) hypothesized engineering programs some critical transitions in the Engineering Succeed Succeed First college Succeed Engineering gateway engineering pathway, but this math course core courses courses model was too simplistic to Fail Fail Fail model some significant Persist Persist Persist differences in curricula at Students who not different institutions Further, Students who graduate in engineering programs persist 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