Las tutorías como estrategias para mejorar la permanencia de los estudiantes. Un estudio en los primeros años de las carreras de Ingeniería.

In this work we present the findings obtained at one stage of a research study carried out as a postdoctoral scholarship granted by CONICET. The main objective of our work is to assess the potentiality of institutional projects designed to promote student permanence in the first years of engineering careers at Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto. This paper is about the study of one institutional project, which is a tutorship project. Favorable institutional contexts as well as features and conditions of these projects are identified. These projects, from the perspective of the people involved in the initiatives of changes, contribute to the permanence of students in engineering careers. The units of observation are the participants of the team coordinating the above-mentioned institutional project. As strategies for data collection, we conducted semi-structured interviews and we analyzed documents. We therefore present findings related to the following points: strengths, achievements and constructed learning, difficulties, institutional conditions that allow the project to achieve its aims, adjustments or changes made, features or conditions of the project that lead to students’ permanence at university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]