A Model Undergraduate Project for Women in Engineering

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, in cooperation with the Sacramento Valley Section of the Society of Women Engineers, is developing, testing, evaluating and refining activities to increase the rate of perseverance of female undergraduate students in engineering. The project builds on the College's significant number of women students and faculty members; its professional staff members who have extensive experience in establishing successful programs in engineering and the well-established campus networks for women in math and science. It addresses the following factors identified by women students, faculty and professional engineers that negatively affect the persistence of women in engineering: isolation, an inability to see the relevance of highly theoretical basic courses, negative experiences in laboratory courses, the "cold" classroom climate and the lack of role models. Evaluation will be done in cooperation with the campus Women's Resource and Research Center. Activities include: "Brown Bag Lunches for Women in Engineering" to address the isolation experienced by freshman and sophomore engineering students; "Shadowing Women Engineers at Work" to counter the negative effects of the highly theoretical courses in the freshman and sophomore years; a new course, "How Things Work" to overcome deficiencies resulting from women students' lack of socialization in how things work and in how male culture works; "Enhancing the Classroom Climate", a faculty workshop for male engineering faculty to sensitize them to the "chilling" dynamics of engineering classrooms; and, Undergraduate Research, a continuing effort to help women engineering students realize how what they have learned applies in "real engineering and to encourage them to use their abilities in graduate study. Activities are designed so that, once tested and refined, they can easily be replicated on other university campuses. Measurable Objectives to determine the effectiveness of the project include: o The persistence and graduation rates of women participants will be compared with the persistence and graduation rates of women who did not participate in any component of the project.