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Increasing Retention by Incorporating Time Management and Study Skills into A Freshmen Engineering Course

Walter L. Bradley and Steven Bradley

Baylor University/ 1QuestLearning

Introduction H.S. College The thesis of this paper is that the primary reason that students see their high school GPA drop by ~1.0 grade Time spent in 30 15 point their freshmen year in college is a lack of time class/wk management and study skills.1,2 As the table illustrates, Study outside 5 25-30 learning in high school is primarily in class while a class significant part of learning in college is outside of class, Learning Directed Self-directed requiring up to 500% more outside study time than was Environment Dependent Independent required in high school. The slower pace and shorter assessment periods students have in high school allow Assessment Short Long Periods them to develop the habit of procrastinating and cramming, with considerable academic success. Table 1. High School vs. College Unfortunately, the much faster pace and longer intervals between assessments in college make the procrastinating and cramming strategy untenable.

This problem is particularly acute in engineering where the step-up from high school is much greater than in many majors, and procrastination in mastery of basic materials quickly leads to ineffective in-class learning. Helping entering freshman to develop effective time management and study skills will enable them to have the best possible chance of succeeding in their freshmen year and continuing in the engineering college. We believe that most students who drop out of engineering do so because they think it is too difficult, without recognizing that the real problem is their poor time management and study skills. The results to be presented in this paper will provide some empirical support for this hypothesis.

We wish to present the results of a study performed at Baylor University, where time management and study skills principles were integrated into a freshman-engineering course. We will describe the approach used to integrate these principles into the course and then present several quantitative measures of the efficacy of incorporating time management and study skills into freshmen engineering classes, including retention and GPA for freshmen engineering students. Results will compare classes from Fall 2002 to Fall 2003, where the same teaching team taught the course to ~75 students with nominally the same qualifications, one class without

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Bradley, S., & Bradley, W. (2004, June), Increasing Retention By Incorporating Time Management And Study Skills Into A Freshman Engineering Course Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13085