55 students in a treatment group received extra instruction in an Emerging Scholars Program (ESP), small group format. The instructor selected problems from a statics textbook for the students to work and discuss in bi-weekly group "workshop" sessions. Hands-on exercises were not developed as planned. The ESP treatment group was compared against a control group. Each group had the same statics teacher and the same GPA at the start of the semester. The assessment scores obtained were similar for each group, thus the ESP approach was determined to be ineffective.

One reason given for the equivalent performance of the two groups was that ESP students possibly substituted their extra help for another source of help (a peer, personal contact with the instructor, personal study time), instead of adding the extra help onto these other sources of help. Further, students self-selected into ESP-Statics on a volunatry basis. It was recommended that if Engineering "identified the kids as likely to fail... [then required these students] to take ESP statics, that would be a good thing." This required approach was successfully adopted on campus in the Mathematics department.