Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 765 de 957
Methods
Our analysis focused on two multi-institution data sets collected in the U.S. as part of the
Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education’s Academic Pathways Study (Atman
et al., 2010). Both data sets were from web-based surveys of first-year, sophomore, junior,
and senior undergraduates, with women oversampled. We limited analysis to the students
meeting two criteria: intention to major in engineering and valid MIDA responses. As part
of the Persistence in Engineering (PIE) survey (Eriş et al., 2010), the first data set was
collected longitudinally each spring from 2004 through 2007 from a total of approximately
160 undergraduates at four institutions: a public research university devoted to
engineering and applied science; a comprehensive, historically Black, private university; a
private research university; and a large, public research university. Among the students
who were surveyed in all four years, 81 (38% women) met our selection criteria for
analysis. The second data set was collected cross-sectionally in early spring of 2008 from a
total of over 4,200 students at 21 varying institutions as part of the Academic Pathways of
People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES; Sheppard et al., 2010). Among these
students, 809 first-years, 825 sophomores, 963 juniors, and 792 seniors (varying between
30% and 37% women) met our selection criteria for analysis. Statistical analyses of
gender differences employed Fisher’s exact test. See the Atman et al. and Sheppard et al.
reports for other methods details.
Findings
To address RQ1, for each of the 23 design activities, we examined the percentage of firstyear
through senior engineering students who selected that activity among their set of six
most important (Table 1). The sparklines (Tufte, 2006) in the table’s “Data” columns show
the four-year sequence of percentages, accompanied with coarse characterizations of the
trends to the right. Activities that were less likely to be selected by upper-level
undergraduates were Building, Imagining, Using creativity, and Visualizing. Those that
were more likely to be selected include Identifying constraints, Iterating, Modeling, and
Prototyping. These findings were observed in both the longitudinal and cross-sectional
samples. Characterizations of four-year trends matched across the two samples for a
substantial majority of activities (18 of the 23).
Extending prior analyses of the longitudinal sample (Chachra et al., 2008), we limited
initial gender comparisons for RQ2 to first-year students. Table 2 shows only those design
activities for which we observed statistically significant gender differences in the
percentage of women and men selecting the activity in either or both of the study designs
(longitudinal and cross-sectional). With the possible exception of Imagining, gender
differences in the smaller, longitudinal sample were mirrored (and often more
pronounced) in the cross-sectional sample. Women tended to favor activities like
Communicating and Understanding the problem, while men tended to favor Building and
Prototyping. The magnitudes of these relative differences are indicated in Figure 1, which
also highlights an exception: the large gender difference in Seeking information that was
observed in the longitudinal sample is absent in the cross-sectional data.
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011