Modeling student success with students

Abstract

Engineering education is a fairly new field of research and student success is in many aspects unexplored territory. Yet, student success is among the most researched topics in higher education. Several agencies have stressed the importance of engineering student success, because they found that there is a shortage of engineers in Europe and it is important that schools of engineering and technology will train more engineers for the labour force [1]. Research has yielded a lot of insight on factors that are related to student success. However, this research has not led to any major changes in student retention, neither in engineering nor in non-engineering subjects [2]. Most studies into student success are based exclusively on statistical analysis, e.g. [3, 4, 5]. In this project we intend to develop a situated model for student success. We include input from students in our research and we use this to enhance our understanding of students and their success and as input for our analysis. This paper is part of this ongoing research effort. In this paper we report on one of the research activities where we collected data from students on their perceptions of factors that contribute to their success. We invited first year students from different engineering programmes to workshops where we asked them which factors influence their success and how these factors are related, in the students' perceptions. We compare the student models with models based on survey data collected in the same university and in the same cohort. The aim of this comparison is to find out if students’ models correlate with models based on data analysis.