An adaptive response model to describe emergent engineering education system properties

To meet current and future challenges, engineers are needed that have different ways of thinking and one way this can be achieved is by attracting and retaining more diverse people from more diverse backgrounds. Student retention and attraction have been studied extensively in engineering education; however the underlying cause is still not well understood. This paper reports the results from the conceptual design and development of a theoretical model to better understand attraction and retention of engineering students and the influences on overall system properties. The proposed adaptive response model, developed by the authors, extends person-environment fit theory and Attraction Selection Attrition theory by introducing temporal scales and multiple hierarchical scales ranging from individuals to organizations. The findings that emerged from this study highlight the system attributes that result from low and high person-environment fit and the impact of the person-environment fit of people within the system on cognitive outcomes.