scholarly journals Building a Summer Bridge Program to Increase Retention and Academic Success for First-year Engineering Students

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin Cairncross ◽  
Sharon Jones ◽  
Zulema Naegele ◽  
Tammy VanDeGrift
Author(s):  
Robyn Paul ◽  
Miriam Nightingale ◽  
Alina Ismaguilova ◽  
Laleh Behjat ◽  
Elena Di Martino ◽  
...  

Diversity in engineering is a key goal, however a barrier for students from diverse backgrounds is the physics requirements in engineering. Often, they will have to choose between the three sciences, and don’t realize that without physics, their options are limited. We launched a pilot program in 2019 to expand access into engineering. Students without high school physics can take a summer bridge program to teach them the fundamentals and prepare them for first year engineering. Physics is taught through bioengineering to leverage their biology background knowledge. This paper presents a thematic analysis of student reflections in the program, using student identity development as a framework.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Hodge ◽  
Margaret Hobson ◽  
Bugrahan Yalvac ◽  
Magdalini Lagoudas ◽  
Jefferey Froyd ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. ar21
Author(s):  
Brittany C. Bradford ◽  
Margaret E. Beier ◽  
Frederick L. Oswald

A meta-analysis of university STEM summer bridge programs found that participation had a medium-sized effect on first-year overall GPA ( d = 0.34) and university retention (Odds Ratio OR] = 1.747). Although the analysis reflects the limited available data, it provides much-needed research on programs’ objective effectiveness and guides future program development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-84
Author(s):  
Emily E Virtue

The transition to college can be difficult for many first-year students. Students who are conditionally enrolled may struggle more than their peers in terms of feeling comfortable in an academic setting. This case study explores how conditionally-enrolled students who participated in a summer bridge program read popular literature to explore their own struggles in the transition to college. Findings call for faculty and staff who work with conditionally-enrolled students to support and accept identity exploration in the classroom, particularly during the first semester.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. ar17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katelyn M. Cooper ◽  
Michael Ashley ◽  
Sara E. Brownell

National calls to improve student academic success in college have sparked the development of bridge programs designed to help students transition from high school to college. We designed a 2-week Summer Bridge program that taught introductory biology content in an active-learning way. Through a set of exploratory interviews, we unexpectedly identified that Bridge students had developed sophisticated views of active learning, even though this was not an explicit goal of the program. We conducted an additional set of semistructured interviews that focused on active learning and compared the interviews of Bridge students with those from non-Bridge students who had been eligible for but did not participate in the program. We used the constant comparative method to identify themes from the interviews. We found that Bridge students perceived that, because they knew how to approach active learning and viewed it as important, they benefited more from active learning in introductory biology than non-Bridge students. Specifically, Bridge students seemed to be more aware of their own learning gains from participating in active learning. Compared with the majority of non-Bridge students, the majority of Bridge students described using a greater variety of strategies to maximize their experiences in active learning. Finally, in contrast to non-Bridge students, Bridge students indicated that they take an equitable approach to group work. These findings suggest that we may be able to prime students to maximize their own and other’s experiences in active learning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa A Harrington ◽  
Andrew Lloyd ◽  
Tomasz Smolinski ◽  
Mazen Shahin

At our Historically-Black University, about 89% of first-year students place into developmental mathematics, negatively impacting retention and degree completion. In 2012, an NSF-funded learning enrichment project began offering the introductory and developmental mathematics courses on-line over the summer to incoming science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors at no cost. Passing rates for the summer on-line classes were around 80%, and students in the on-line classes scored equivalently on the common departmental final exams as students taking the classes in the traditional format. For students who passed the on-line classes, their performance in the following classes (College Algebra and Trigonometry) exceeded that of students who progressed to those courses by taking the traditional series of in-person courses. Three years of data show that students who started college with an on-line mathematics course in a summer bridge program had a higher first year GPA, a better first year retention rate and earned significantly more credits in their first year than the overall population of STEM students. These results suggest that offering introductory mathematics courses on-line as part of a freshman bridge program is an effective, scalable intervention to increase the academic success of students who enter college under-prepared in mathematics. The positive results are particularly exciting since the students in our project were 87% minority.


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