Promoting Women and Minorities in Engineering - A Summer Program for Incoming Freshmen.

Since 2017 our institution has hosted, through a special office in our engineering college, an intensive summer program for underrepresented groups drawn from incoming freshmen who intend to major in a STEM discipline. The stated purpose of the program is to recruit and retain students in STEM. In particular, the program targets women and minorities, though it is open to all incoming freshmen. This three-week, on-campus summer program introduces the participants, many of whom are first-generation college students, to the rigors of higher education. Their daily schedule includes a regimen of condensed STEM courses, with a special emphasis on first semester calculus. Their days are similar to those of typical freshmen in a STEM major, with the addition of evening tutoring, mentoring, and counseling sessions. In this paper, we present initial results from a longitudinal study to track the academic progress of students who participated in this enrichment program in the summers of 2017 and 2018. We consider persistence in STEM and college retention and compare the program participants to their non-participant classmates. We also consider, in much more detail, two important introductory STEM courses: Calculus I and Physics I. For these two courses our data allow us to compare participants and non-participants in the grade categories final course average, final exam, and classroom attendance. We also calculate ABC rates for Calculus I - that is, the percent of students earning a grade of A, B, or C. In most cases, our data allow us to make comparisons of participants and non-participants by various demographic subgroups. We find some evidence that the program is successful in preparing students for Calculus I - both the overall under-represented minority population and the African American population show some benefit from program participation. We also see some positive results for these populations with regard to retention in STEM majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]