Coaching program for academic success: Promoting equal opportunities for engineering students

This paper examines a special Personal-Academic Coaching (PAC) program for promoting students' self-efficacy and academic success, which was developed and implemented in a leading engineering college in Israel located in the northern periphery, and seeking to increase accessibility and equal opportunities to higher education. The PAC program was developed to cater to the students' sources of difficulties while addressing the problem of dropout, particularly in the first year of engineering studies. This new program is based on personal coaching principles, but includes an additional component of imparting tools required for academic success. The coaches are 25 college lecturers who were especially trained for this new coaching program. Two hundred and eleven engineering students who had failed in their first year participated in the research during 2015-2016. Forty-six students participated in the PAC in individual weekly coaching encounters with a lecturer-coach, for one semester. The research investigated the PAC program's contribution to students' learning skills and academic achievements. The research examined the academic achievements of students who participated in the PAC and those who did not, at the end of the first year, and at the end of the following two semesters. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 students to examine their perceptions regarding the PAC program's contribution to their academic success. The research findings show that PAC program contributed to improving academic achievements of students, changing from an unsatisfactory academic status to a solid status that allowed them to continue their engineering studies, thus preventing dropout. The students reflect acknowledgement of the PAC contribution to their academic success in three major areas: improving self-management skills, taking active responsibility for learning, and getting significant emotional support from lecturer-coaches. The Teaching and Learning Center and college management find these contributions to be of the utmost importance and provide reason to allocate resources to additional programs for promoting equal opportunities and advancing students from diverse backgrounds in the periphery. PAC can be adapted to other inclusion purposes in academic institutions.