Sally Steadman

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Total Citations

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About

Sally Steadman is an engineering education researcher whose work centers on student recruitment, retention, and early engagement in undergraduate engineering programs. Based at the University of South Alabama, Steadman has dedicated her scholarship to addressing one of the most persistent challenges in engineering education: keeping talented students in the pipeline before they ever experience the discipline's most rewarding aspects. Her 2020 paper "Novel Program for Engineering Student Retention" introduced an innovative two-week summer program launched in 2012, designed to expose high-achieving incoming students to exciting fields such as robotics and engineering design — areas that typically capture student enthusiasm but are rarely encountered in early coursework. Complementing this work, her paper "Impacting First-Year Engineering Retention" further examines how targeted pre-semester interventions can meaningfully improve persistence among high-potential first-year students. Together, these contributions reflect a practical, student-centered approach to a national challenge, and while her citation counts remain emerging — with four and three citations respectively — her program-based research offers replicable models that institutions nationwide can adapt to combat engineering attrition and strengthen their incoming cohorts.