Addressing Retention and Improving Performance in Gateway Engineering Courses

It has been reported that incoming students are weak in Mathematics and thereby having great difficulty in engineering courses. As a result, they are dropping out of engineering programs resulting in low retention and graduation rates. It is desired to reinforce mathematical concepts in gateway courses. One way is to engage them via additional informal instruction sessions, peer mentoring research projects. Our experiment with five activities of offering Saturday Academy, peer mentoring, professional lecture series, freshman seminar and summer research projects has been running for two semesters. Results are preliminary and future looks optimistic.