ABSTRACT
This Complete Evidence-based Practice paper evaluates the impact of learning communities on the academic success of first-year engineering students. The Engineering Learning Community (ELC) at a large urban university is a program that purposefully recruits talented high school applicants with financial need. The ELC enrolls these applicants into cohort-specific sections of classes and provides mentoring and additional resources for the students' first year of college. The results of the first three years of the ELC program were presented at ASEE 2020. Currently in its fifth year, the ELC program has undergone numerous revisions and improvements based upon student and faculty feedback, best practices, and increased financial resources. The main feature of the fourth year ELC program is the addition of up to $20,000 in scholarship from a S-STEM NSF award. Another significant change in the fourth year is the re-design of the mentorship program. COVID-19 hit in the second semester of the fourth year of ELC and added its own challenges to the program. The impact of COVID-19 on the students' response to the pandemic has been studied as well. To take a first look at the efficacy of the ELC program over four iterations, grade point averages (GPAs) of ELC students from each cohort were compared. We hypothesize that students from cohort 4 will have the highest overall GPA given that they have accessed the most recent iteration of the ELC, which includes scholarship funding, improved student-to-mentor ratios and a newly redesigned special topics course. Analysis of Variance of GPAs reveals that cohort 4 has a significantly higher GPA after one year in the ELC than cohorts 2 and 3, but no significant differences between other cohorts were found. Further analysis shows no significant differences in high school GPA between the cohorts, indicating that the improvements in cohort 4 are not due changes in recruiting practices. Additionally, ELC cohort 4 showed greater academic resiliency during COVID-19 than their non-ELC counterparts, as revealed through statistically significant lower utilization of the modified grading policy, as well as higher observed completion rates in Spring 2020. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021