Retention and Performance of Female and Male Undergraduates in Freshman Engineering

虽然现在进入本科工程专业的女性的SAT数学成绩比男性高，但她们中的许多人在第一年之后就没能进入大学。文献中有相当多的证据表明，可能存在阈值效应或临界质量效应：如果一个班级中有足够比例的学生是女性，那么对这门学科的态度、表现和记忆都会得到改善。为什么会产生这样的效果还不清楚。本研究建议在两个学期的时间里，在30所大型大学的本科工程项目中，改变工程第一门课程——统计学的不同部分的性别平衡。在每个机构，教师、教学大纲、教学风格、总体班级规模和教学的其他方面将保持不变。在不伤害个别学生的情况下，在各个部门实现不同的女性比例。第一门课程结束后的坚持情况将被跟踪，成绩和其他方面的表现将通过结构化的面试来衡量或获得，无论男女。希望可以为所有机构或各类型机构设立一个促进性别平衡的关键区域。如果是这样的话，拥有多个工程入门课程的大学应该能够以一种相当直接和行政上容易的方式提高女性的留用率。

Although women now enter undergraduate engineering programs with higher math SAT scores than men, many of them fail to process beyond the first year. There is considerable evidence in the literature that there may be a threshold or critical- mass effect: if a sufficient proportion of students in a class are women, attitudes toward the subject, performance, and retention are improved. Why such an effect may operate is not understood. This research study proposes to vary gender balance across different sections of the first course in engineering, statics, in the undergraduate engineering programs of 30 large universities, over a period of two semesters. In each institution, the instructors, syllabus, teaching style, overall class size, and other aspects of instruction will be held constant. Without doing harm to individual students, different proportions of women in the various sections will be achieved. Persistence beyond the first course will be tracked, and grades and other aspects of performance will be measured or obtained by structured interviews, in both men and women. The hope is that a critical zone for gender balance may be established, either for all institutions or for subtypes of institutions. If so, universities with multiple sections of beginning engineering courses ought to be able to improve retention of women in a fairly straightforward and administratively easy way.