PEDAGOGICAL FACTORS AFFECTING RETENTION RATES OF FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING STUDENTS: A SYSTEMATIC MAPPING

The causes of low academic performance of university students worldwide are reasons of concern for Higher Education Institutions (HEI), government institutions and student families. The retention is an indicator of academic performance and according to several researchers the retention is a social phenomenon that depends on multiple factors (teachers, institutions and students-oriented), in this respect it deserves to be investigated. The present study aims to summarize and classify existing scientific evidence regarding the pedagogical factors that affect retention in the first-year engineering students. Therefore, we have used the method of systematic mapping, a type of appropriate study for structuring, summarizing and classifying researches on the content, methods and trends of publications. This method consists of three stages, in which eight of the studies were identified as relevant and mapped to ten dimensions. These dimensions are: lesson planning, lesson organization, student - teacher relationship, teaching methods, teaching techniques, types of exams, academic autonomy, use and quality of didactic resources, tutoring and academic updating // pedagogical training.

The systematic mapping study allows us to meet the proposed objective, and the results obtained can be a starting point to appropriately develop future researches on pedagogical factors related to academic performance, student approval, dropout, and retention rates. These results are relevant for teachers and also for education authorities. In this specific case, the information obtained encourages the authors of this study to carry out a future work concerning a systematic literature review.