The Appalachian Cohort for Engineering: An evaluation of S-STEM strategies for success

The Appalachian Cohort for Engineering (ACE) at Ohio University is an NSF S-STEM funded scholarship program for students in Engineering and Computer Science that combines intensive early intervention approaches (i.e., learning communities, peer-led team learning, midterm progress reports, and purposeful selection of academic advisors) with peer advising and cohort building activities. The intent of this program is to help academically capable but financially insecure students from the economically disadvantaged Appalachian counties of Ohio and surrounding states to complete important early milestones in their academic careers. The ultimate goal of this project is to build evidence-based approaches for encouraging retention and early academic milestone completion for a broad range of undergraduate students in the STEM disciplines. The research component of this project seeks to determine which services are most effective at encouraging and supporting these students to reach early academic milestones to promote long-term retention and degree completion. This component involves substantial data collection that includes observational field notes and one-on-one contact records, along with the required NSF data elements. Much of the data collection is provided by trained peer advisors; capturing the following dimensions of academic wellness: personal/transitional, social, academic, financial, health and stress-coping, study sessions and tutoring, goal setting, follow up data, and academic reviews by course. In addition, field notes are collected that describe the setting, attendees, acts, and reflections on specific events that happen throughout the year. This project is in its first year of implementation. In this work-in-progress paper, we report on the design of the project, early successes and challenges, the data collection strategy, and the preliminary results of this project. In this first year, early observational results indicated that this body of students need- d both social and academic support; with both being equal emphasis. Furthermore, this body of students indicated that one-on-one support and goal setting were important components of their early success.