Increased student completion
The project examines the reasons for low student completion rates on chemical engineering programmes by looking at data and interviewing students about their experiences and challenges, and proposes actions to improve them.
Background and problem definition
The graduation rate in the Engineering Chemistry programme (CTKEM) and the Chemical Engineering programme (TIKED) is currently not as high as desired. It has been below 50 per cent for many years, with a few exceptions, even if all students are included, regardless of the time of graduation.
What we want to achieve
Measures must be taken to increase completion rates. Therefore, we want to investigate what causes the low completion and implement measures to improve it.
Challenges
We have studied a number of different parameters that were assumed to contribute to a low completion, by reviewing statistics from KTH and by interviewing students. Examples of parameters are the students' background knowledge, the point in the programme at which dropouts occurand the search profile of those who drop out. The Programme director at TIKED has had discussions with teachers and students about completion and what can be done.
Many programmes at KTH suffer from low completion. However, many programmes probably also have in common with CTKEM and TIKED that it is difficult to point to any dominant parameter that causes the low completion.
Suggestions for improvement
- We want to introduce student-led math sessions in the first chemistry course in p1 and p2. It is a gateway course for several other courses, and it is important that students get a good start to their studies and get used to how studying at university works.
- We have also divided the first chemistry course, which was previously 8 credits in p2, into 3 credits in p1 and 5 credits in p2, so that students can be assessed more continuously.
- A pilot project "Kick-start" is underway where the Programme director and a teacher meet a small group of first year students once a week to discuss learning strategies.
Results and lessons learnt
We were able to see a clear link between low results in the introductory chemistry exam at reception and low results in the first year chemistry course.
The student interviews were valuable even if the answers did not clearly point to any specific cause. The interviews showed that some students did not realise how much mathematics and how much technical work was involved in the programme, that it was valuable to have read Chemistry 2 and that more help at the beginning of the programme would be good.
Next step
In the coming years, we intend to compare the results in the first semester of Year 1 with previous years to see what effect the division of the first chemistry term and the introduction of student led, drop-in math sessions.