Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Session 1392

Assessing Women in Engineering (AWE): Assessment Results on Women Engineering Students Beliefs

Rose M. Marra, Cherith Moore,; Mieke Schuurman; Barbara Bogue University of Missouri – Columbia / The Pennsylvania State University

Introduction

Women in Engineering (WIE) programs around the United States are a crucial part of our country's response to the need for more women in engineering professions1. For Women in Engineering (WIE) programs to be maximally effective, they must have access to validated assessment instruments for measuring the effectiveness of their recruitment and retention activities for women in engineering studies. Such assessment results can provide the basis for the development and revamping of effective activities designed to meet program objectives and missions.

This paper reports the development and early results of a survey undertaken as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Assessing Women in Engineering (AWE) project. The instrument is designed to measure undergraduate women students’ self-efficacy in studying engineering. Self-efficacy is “belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action necessary to manage prospective situations" 2. Prior work from Blaisdell3 has shown that feelings of efficaciousness can be an important predictor in the success of women studying engineering. In our project, we developed a survey instrument designed to measure self-efficacy in engineering, feelings of inclusion and outcomes expectations, and collected responses from undergraduate women studying engineering at four institutions: Penn State University (PSU), Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), University of Texas – Austin (UT Austin) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

The paper describes the development process for ensuring reliability and validity and also reports the preliminary results of the analysis to answer the following research questions. 1. Do students’ feelings of self-efficacy vary from one institution to another? 2. Do students with different year-standings answer the module items differently regardless of institution? 3. At each institution, do students with different year-standings answer the module items differently?

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright  2004, American Society for Engineering Education.

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Marra, R., & Moore, C., & Schuurman, M., & Bogue, B. (2004, June), Assessing Women In Engineering (Awe): Assessment Results On Women Engineering Students' Beliefs Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13852