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The Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES) was deployed for a second time in Spring 2008 to undergraduate engineering students at 21 American universities. The goal of APPLES was to corroborate and extend findings from the Academic Pathways Study and the first deployment of APPLES (Spring 2007) on factors that correlate with persistence in engineering on a national scale. This set of deployments, which surveyed over 4,500 students, was among the largest and broadest cross-sectional surveys focusing on undergraduate engineering ever undertaken.Because there was no readily-available list of undergraduate students attending American institutions studying and intending to study engineering, we sampled by institution using institutional characteristics such as Carnegie 2000 classification. In seeking participation by a broad range of institutions, we recognized the need to vary the target student strata for recruitment by institution. In this process paper, we present an overview of our institutional sampling, discuss our student sampling and recruitment, and report response results. We extend our lessons learned from deploying the online survey at four institutions to 21 institutions, including coordination with local campus coordinators, IRB requirements, subject recruitment and deployment to build on the model for conducting survey design and research for engineering education researchers.Index Terms -Cross-sectional study, Engineering persistence, Recruitment, Survey methodology. OVERVIEW & BACKGROUNDThe goal of the second set of Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES or APPLE survey) deployments is to corroborate and extend the data from the Academic Pathway Study (APS) on a national level. The APS seeks to explore key questions around skills, identity development, and factors that relate to student persistence in engineering. The APS data include two survey instruments developed to study questions around persistence: the Persistence in Engineering (PIE) survey (deployed seven times over four years with a longitudinal cohort of 160 students at four institutions starting in 2003), and APPLES [1-4].APPLES was first deployed ("APPLES1") in Spring 2007 and surveyed the broader undergraduate engineering population at the four core APS institutions [5]. The second APPLES administration ("APPLES2"), the focus of this paper, surveyed undergraduate students at 21 universities in the United States 1 . The APPLES instrument is derived from the PIE survey instrument. The APPLES2 instrument is nearly identical to the APPLES1 instrument; the major changes being the addition of items for two new and several existing variables, and basic improvements for readability (see [1] for more details).Due to our focus on persistence in engineering education, we recruited three groups of undergraduate students to take APPLES: (1) engineering students: those who declared an engineering major or had already committed to engineering programs; (2) pre-engineering students: those who intended ...

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Amid concerns that U.S. educational institutions are not attracting and graduating sufficient numbers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students with the skills and knowledge needed to tackle the technological challenges of the 21 st century, the National Science Foundation granted funding in 2003 to the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), dedicated to advancing the scholarship of engineering learning and teaching. The largest element of the CAEE is the Academic Pathways Study (APS), an in-depth, mixed methods exploration of the undergraduate student experience and the graduate's transition into professional practice. The APS addresses the following research questions: 1. How do students' engineering skills and knowledge develop and/or change over time? 2. How does one's identity as an engineer evolve? 3. What elements of engineering education contribute to the students' skills/knowledge and identity? What elements contribute to students' persistence in an engineering major and persistence in the engineering profession? 4. What skills do early career engineers need as they enter the workplace? Given the scale of the APS investigation with multiple schools and student populations, the answers to these questions will allow us to identify educational practices that contribute to students persisting and thriving in engineering, and potential strategies for attracting more students to the study of engineering. This paper describes the evolution and implementation of the Academic Pathways Study (APS), a five year, multi-institution study designed to address these questions and implications for academic practices. As such, this paper is a "welcome mat" or introduction for those interested in learning more about APS. Components of the paper address questions researchers designing new studies may have about the organizational and technical infrastructure that supported this project, or about the quantitative and qualitative research methods, tools, and protocols used. Other components of the paper address questions that researchers and engineering faculty and administrators might have regarding how to explore the findings and insights that are emerging from this extensive longitudinal and cross-sectional study of students' pathways through engineering. Research findings to date are summarized in a companion paper entitled Findings from the Academic Pathways Study of Engineering Undergraduates, by Atman, et al 4. 1. APS Background and Goals The past two decades have witnessed an ongoing national dialog about the lack of gender, race and ethnic diversity among those studying and practicing engineering 1 and the adequacy of students' preparation for today's engineering challenges 2. Further complicating the discussions are worries that U.S. educational institutions are not attracting and retaining sufficient students in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields to keep up with the country's demands. In response, the National Science Foundation set out in 2002...