Visualizing and Identifying Patterns of Student Flow Through Undergraduate Engineering Programs

Bonnie S. Boardman

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Conference: 2025 ASEE -GSW Annual Conference
Location: Arlington, TX, Texas
Publication Date: March 9, 2025
Start Date: March 9, 2025
End Date: March 11, 2025
Page Count: 12
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--55087
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/55087
Download Count: 10

Paper Authors

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Bonnie S. Boardman The University of Texas at Arlington

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Bonnie Boardman is the Undergraduate Program Director and a Professor of Instruction in the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington. Her primary research interests are in the engineering education and resource planning disciplines.

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Abstract

Graduation and retention rates are increasingly important metrics to programs, colleges, universities, and governments. Decreased state funding of higher education requires programs to be efficient with money that that they spend on educational activities. This, along with the increased emphasis on student success, makes identifying and addressing weaknesses and potential curriculum stumbling blocks early and accurately critical to program administrators. An understanding of the mobility patterns of students is necessary to make good decisions about how, where, and when to focus resources aimed at improving retention and student success. (Kuley, Maw, & Fonstad, 2015) Being able to visualize the student flow patterns through a program can aid in these efforts.

Students progress through undergraduate engineering programs at different rates. There are many variables including their past experiences, outside of school responsibilities, and scheduling of courses, among others. The advancement from one program categorization to another is based upon progress in the degree plan, not upon credit-hour accumulation. This is important to schools where a large percentage of students come to the school with transfer credit from Community Colleges. Students in their first semester are often labelled as juniors or seniors due to the number of credit-hours that they have transferred in, irrespective of whether that credit applies to the degree program they are pursuing.

The establishment of a curriculum network provides the opportunity to map varying learning pathways as student’s progress through programs of study. (Dawson & Hubball, 2014) The consistent categorization used by all COE programs at UTA, allows for this mapping of student progress which is not based solely on credit hour accumulation. Visualizations of these student flows into and out of programs can help administrators better understand student flow patterns. Sankey diagrams are ideal for visualizing flows through a process. Sankey diagrams have lines with thicknesses proportional to the magnitude of the flow. (Oran, Martin, Klymkowsky, & Stubbs, 2019) (Raji, Duggan, DeCotes, Huang, & Vander Zanden, 2021)

This information would be useful in many ways. One of the sections of the ABET Self-Study report aims to help accreditors (and the programs they are accrediting) understand the programs’ students, where they come from, how successful they are in completing their degrees, etc. These visualizations would be very helpful in describing students’ paths through programs. Secondly, a college considering changes to the admissions and transfer processes into and within the college could gain valuable insight from this information. Getting an accurate “as-is” view of student paths would be helpful in developing new processes as well as benchmarking for evaluating the performance of any changes in processes. Specific research questions (RQs) of this project are:

RQ1: Are there differences in entrance and/or exit patterns of undergraduate engineering programs that can be visualized with Sankey diagrams? RQ2: Do patterns in student flows suggest where in a particular program, or on which students, resources aimed at improving retention and student success should be focused?

Citation
Format

Boardman, B. S. (2025, March), Visualizing and Identifying Patterns of Student Flow Through Undergraduate Engineering Programs Paper presented at 2025 ASEE -GSW Annual Conference, Arlington, TX, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--55087

TY - CPAPER
AB - Graduation and retention rates are increasingly important metrics to programs, colleges, universities, and governments. Decreased state funding of higher education requires programs to be efficient with money that that they spend on educational activities. This, along with the increased emphasis on student success, makes identifying and addressing weaknesses and potential curriculum stumbling blocks early and accurately critical to program administrators. An understanding of the mobility patterns of students is necessary to make good decisions about how, where, and when to focus resources aimed at improving retention and student success. (Kuley, Maw, &amp;amp; Fonstad, 2015) Being able to visualize the student flow patterns through a program can aid in these efforts.

Students progress through undergraduate engineering programs at different rates. There are many variables including their past experiences, outside of school responsibilities, and scheduling of courses, among others. The advancement from one program categorization to another is based upon progress in the degree plan, not upon credit-hour accumulation. This is important to schools where a large percentage of students come to the school with transfer credit from Community Colleges. Students in their first semester are often labelled as juniors or seniors due to the number of credit-hours that they have transferred in, irrespective of whether that credit applies to the degree program they are pursuing.

The establishment of a curriculum network provides the opportunity to map varying learning pathways as student’s progress through programs of study. (Dawson &amp;amp; Hubball, 2014) The consistent categorization used by all COE programs at UTA, allows for this mapping of student progress which is not based solely on credit hour accumulation. Visualizations of these student flows into and out of programs can help administrators better understand student flow patterns. Sankey diagrams are ideal for visualizing flows through a process. Sankey diagrams have lines with thicknesses proportional to the magnitude of the flow. (Oran, Martin, Klymkowsky, &amp;amp; Stubbs, 2019) (Raji, Duggan, DeCotes, Huang, &amp;amp; Vander Zanden, 2021)

This information would be useful in many ways. One of the sections of the ABET Self-Study report aims to help accreditors (and the programs they are accrediting) understand the programs’ students, where they come from, how successful they are in completing their degrees, etc. These visualizations would be very helpful in describing students’ paths through programs. Secondly, a college considering changes to the admissions and transfer processes into and within the college could gain valuable insight from this information. Getting an accurate “as-is” view of student paths would be helpful in developing new processes as well as benchmarking for evaluating the performance of any changes in processes.
Specific research questions (RQs) of this project are:

RQ1: Are there differences in entrance and/or exit patterns of undergraduate engineering programs that can be visualized with Sankey diagrams?
RQ2: Do patterns in student flows suggest where in a particular program, or on which students, resources aimed at improving retention and student success should be focused?

AU - Bonnie S. Boardman
CY - Arlington, TX, Texas
DA - 2025/03/09
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Visualizing and Identifying Patterns of Student Flow Through Undergraduate Engineering Programs
UR - https://peer.asee.org/55087
DO - 10.18260/1-2--55087
ER -