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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thursday, April 12, 2001

Study Suggests Approaches to Keeping Women in Engineering Programs

By PETER MONAGHAN

Seattle

Female engineering students place a high value on out-of-the-classroom support activities like field trips, guest speakers, tutoring services, study groups, and career programs, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

"These programs seem to have a positive effect and seem to be a positive strategy for increasing levels of success," said Mario Delci, one of the researchers.

The finding is significant, he said, because he and his fellow researchers also have found that female engineering students' perceptions of how supportive their departments are have a marked effect on whether they remain in their programs. "We realized pretty early that perception of department support seemed to be strongly associated with leaving or staying in engineering," said Mr. Delci.

According to the researchers, women account for only 20 percent of engineering enrollments, and 8.5 percent of America's engineers. Also, female engineering students are more likely to leave the field than are male students.

Mr. Delci completed the research along with two colleagues at the private Goodman Research Group Inc., where he is a research assistant. The others were Irene F. Goodman, the company's founder and president, and Christine M. Cunningham, a senior research associate.

The research is part of a larger, national longitudinal study -- supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation -- of women's participation in engineering education. That study is the first to try to identify on a national scale how women's experiences in engineering education -- both institutional and personal factors, including department climate, teaching practices, support programs and student expectations -- combine to encourage women to stay and succeed in engineering or to fail and leave the field.

The researchers have administered extensive surveys to 21,000 female engineering majors at 53 schools of engineering.

Even among students who had left their engineering programs, participation in support activities "is positively associated with positive perceptions of department support for students," the researchers reported. That, they suggested, points to the advisability of increasing outreach. Mr. Delci suggested that the findings could help departments to act earlier to encourage female students to stay on track toward engineering degrees.


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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education