Does Gender Affect Student Perception of Engineering Courses in aCommon First Year Program?

摘要

In the fall of 2000, Michigan Technological University started a common first year program forall engineering students. In conjunction with the student course evaluations, the studentsanswered ten additional questions. These questions were used to evaluate their perception of thefirst year engineering courses. The responses were used to assess the students’:? comfort in using the material and software taught in the courses,? experiences in working on a multi-disciplinary team? perceptions of the semester design project? self-assessments of their technical communication skills? reporting of the time spent on this course and if they thought they spent too much timeon the courseThe students were asked to report their gender. When the data were analyzed, there weresignificant differences between the male and female students. For instance, the women tended tospend more time on homework and report that this amount of work was not excessive. The menreported the opposite. The women tended to rank their ability to use the tools taught in the classlower than their male counterparts. This statistic was contradicted with student performance.Typically, the female students out perform or perform at the same level as the men.This paper discusses the surveys that have been completed over a three year period. Itinvestigates how the data changed over time and how gender may have affected studentresponse.