Exploring Factors Influencing the Retention of Physics Majors

Author / Creator

AAPT SM21 (2021)

Conferences

AAPT SM21 PS.A-SA-07: PER: Diverse Investigations I (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

This talk examines the retention of physics majors at a moderately sized physics department which struggles with increasing the number of graduates using 20 years of graduation data. Survival analy...

This talk examines the retention of physics majors at a moderately sized physics department which struggles with increasing the number of graduates using 20 years of graduation data. Survival analysis identifies the point of highest risk for two potential paths out of the major: leaving college and changing majors. Substantial risk of losing majors exists through the first two years of college. Logistic regression is used to explore the factors related to retention in general and through the first two years of college. Decision trees, a method applied in machine learning, is used to quantify the thresholds of these variables important to evaluating risk.

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