Students Persisting in Engineering Survey
Retention of students in engineering continues to be of concern. To best address this area, we need to know what contributes to both students persisting in engineering and what contributes to their leaving. The persisting in engineering instrument is designed to measure both male and female student's reasons for persisting in engineering programs.
Average Review: 
(3.0)
by Whitney Mims,
Research Assistant, ,
The Students Persisting in Engineering Survey is meant to be used in conjunction with the Students Leaving Engineering survey, so be sure to look at both of them if you are planning to use the tool.
The survey does a good job of identifying aspects of a student's experience that could support their decision to continue (and eventually complete) their engineering degree. In addition, since it takes demographic information, a program could perform differential analysis to see if there are trends present in certain groups but not in others.
The Students Leaving Engineering Survey is meant to be used in conjunction with the Students Persisting in Engineering survey, so be sure to look at both of them if you are planning to use the tool.
However, in terms of "quantifying a student's initial commitment to completing a degree," it is less strong. It asks students two questions about their "confidence" in their ability to complete their degree, both initially and presently. I was unsure how the tool conceptualizes the "commitment" construct and have reservations about whether or not the questions actually assess it meaningfully.
Additionally, this survey deals directly with current engineering majors, so it is not really a tool that is applicable to informal STEM, particularly OST. However, if you are part of an engineering program and looking to evaluate the retention capacity of your program, this could be a helpful tool.
