Dropout rates in engineering degree programmes at universities are high, and skilled workers are needed. Universities try to prevent dropouts with different offers one of which is attending bridging courses. Research on the effects of these programmes is rare, especially in subject-specific programmes and study formats like cooperative education.…

Remedial courses may support under-prepared candidates for higher education, but their effectiveness is still questioned especially in European countries, where their introduction is comparably recent. This paper implements a doubly robust estimator to account for heterogeneity between remedial and nonremedial students and possible noncompliance…

To stimulate a flexible lifelong learning system students can enter university via lateral entry. Unlike traditional first-year students, lateral entrance students are not well-studied. Therefore this study focuses on comparing first-year students with a specific group of lateral entrants, namely bridging students at the Faculty of Engineering…

In this paper, we present our experience with redesigning an introductory computer science course for (electrical) engineers with blended learning concepts. It is a large mandatory course with eight credit points over the course of two semesters, where first year electrical engineers learn how to program with Arduino, C and Python. Additionally,…

Contribution: A demonstration of a move from face-to-face to blended learning in an engineering Master's program by adding a parallel online group, which showed the synergy between blended and online approaches in terms of level of interaction, enrollment, student satisfaction, dropout rate, and final grades. Background: Education's transition…

The dropout rate of university engineering studies is correlated with the absence of retention of freshman in the basic subjects. The aim of this work is to determine the effect of cooperative learning and the characteristics of students on learning, persistence, and academic performance. We have performed a study of learning, persistence and…

Although the number of engineering students is increasing, dropout rates remain high. This problem is also present in the Faculty of Engineering Technology (FET) at KU Leuven, Belgium, which resulted in the need for an in-depth analysis of the academic achievement of the bridging students there. This study examines the contribution of a range of…

This work presents the assessment of the development and evolution of an active methodology (Project-Based Learning--PBL) implemented on the course "Unit Operations in Environmental Engineering", within the bachelor's degree in Environmental Engineering, with the purpose of decreasing the dropout rate in this course. After the initial…

This study focuses on quantitative long-term effects of Supplemental Instruction (SI) in terms of graduation and dropout rates. One of the main aims of SI is to introduce students to effective study strategies and techniques. If SI is introduced at an early stage for new students in higher education, it should therefore be expected that this…

The present study was carried out to determine the motivating factors for enrolling in an engineering study programme in open and distance learning (ODL) and the factors that affect the students' performance. The study was conducted with two convenient samples of students following distance learning courses in engineering technology, conducted by…

Faculty of Engineering Technology of the Open University of Sri Lanka has been offering engineering programmes at a distance for the last two decades or so. However, completion rates in Faculty of Engineering Technology are lower compared to the other faculties of the University. This paper investigates the reasons for low completion rates in the…

The monitoring and support of university freshmen is considered very important at many educational institutions. In this paper we describe the results of the educational data mining case study aimed at predicting the Electrical Engineering (EE) students drop out after the first semester of their studies or even before they enter the study program…

This paper is a report on the teaching experiment conducted in the Introduction to Engineering I course at PUC-Rio's Technical-Scientific Center (CTC) during the two terms of 1997. The idea was to test and develop hands-on teaching methodology as set forth in "Hands-on Teaching and Concurrent Teaching: Relations and Difficulties" (Carmo…

This report describes student technicians who dropped out of postsecondary education courses before qualifying for the New Zealand Certificate of Engineering (NZCE). The exploratory study describes some of the characteristics and progress of the students who dropped out of NZCE studies and investigates the reasons for high dropout among students.…

"The Condition of Education 2017" is a congressionally mandated annual report summarizing the latest data on education in the United States. This report is designed to help policymakers and the public monitor educational progress. This year's report includes 50 indicators on topics ranging from prekindergarten through postsecondary…