Collaborative Research: GSE/RES The Effect of Climate and Pedagogy on Persistence: A Longitudinal Study of Women in Undergraduate Engineering Programs

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Intellectual merit: The researchers are conducting a longitudinal, multi-institutional, and multivariate study determining how climate and pedagogy affect the persistence of women in undergraduate engineering programs. Institutional data from 1987-2004 at nine institutions granting 1/12 of the engineering bachelor?s degrees awarded to women will answer the research question, ?How does the persistence of women engineering students vary by race, engineering major, cohort year, and institution, and specifically, what pockets of success can be identified?? The 17-year study period makes it possible to define persistence as the six-year graduation rate in engineering, which anchors the results in the context of national persistence data. The research uses climate and pedagogy as lenses through which to view the persistence of undergraduate engineering women, leveraging the success of multiple National Science Foundation projects by studying the relationships among a significant amount of previously collected data and establishing the context of those data. A timeline of critical incidents in institutional policy and leadership, enriched by interviews gathering retrospective data from faculty and administrators, clarify the relationships of climate and pedagogy to persistence. Semi-structured interviews of students in populations in which persistence is high are used to clarify the findings. The MIDFIELD dataset includes course sections, making it possible to study the effects of critical mass among women in engineering. Broader impact: This work builds on the theoretical foundation developed in previous qualitative studies, developing a scaffold of quantitative results that can support the informed decisions of policymakers. Creating a longitudinal perspective of how climate and pedagogy affect persistence will reach multiple stakeholders at engineering institutions--speaking with the authority of large sample sizes as well as with the softer voice of individual students. The result will be a compelling story rather than a report of the result of a single study. The research team spans multiple engineering disciplines, the social sciences, and human resource development, which is ideal for diffusion to a wide audience. The leadership roles of team members in the American Society of Engineering Education, its Educational Research and Methods division, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Education Society, as well as affiliations with departments of Engineering Education at Purdue, Virginia Tech, and Clemson, and the National Academy of Engineering?s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education, ensures broad dissemination.