Pedagogical methods for improving women's participation and success in engineering education: a review of recent literature.

 
Table of Contents 
 
Introduction 
In-Class Pedagogical Interventions 
Faculty Impact 
Effects of External Resources and Support on Retention 
of Women in Engineering 
Longitudinal Analyses of Factors Related to Retaining Women 
in Engineering Education 
Summary and Recommendations 
References 

Introduction

The field of engineering has been slow to open to women. While women received 55 percent of social science Bachelor's degrees and 62 percent of biological science Bachelor's degrees awarded in 2003, only 20 percent of engineering Bachelor's degrees were awarded to women. The same year, women made up 43 percent of the workforce among social scientists and 43 percent among biological scientists but made up only 11 percent of the engineering workforce (National Science Foundation, 2007).

Targeted pedagogical interventions have the potential to help improve women's representation in the engineering disciplines. This Literature Review surveys recent literature that describes and assesses interventions designed to improve retention and success in undergraduate engineering education that have relevance to efforts to improve gender representation. It focuses on two main bodies of empirical work: 1) research articles that address instructional practices asserted to enhance the attraction, retention, and progression of women in engineering classes, and 2) empirical articles that assess a learning intervention in undergraduate engineering classes that could be related to how college women learn.

For each of the following sources of empirical articles, three years of contents were searched (2005 - 2008):

* Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Literature Reviews

* Journal of Engineering Education