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Student Perceptions And Persistence : Taking A Person-Centered Approach To Understand Undergraduate Engineering Retention., Brittany Flanery Crawford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many students are leaving their engineering programs as early as the first semester of their undergraduate studies. Although some of the factors related to engineering retention are largely academic, others are tied closely to students’ beliefs or perceptions. Student perceptions data are useful, but often overlooked by researchers who wish to take a person-centered approach to uncover profiles of student beliefs, both adaptive and maladaptive, when it comes to understanding engineering retention. The sample consisted of full-time undergraduate engineering students (N = 834) in the first semester of their undergraduate engineering programs. I used latent transition analysis (LTA) to …