Women in Engineering (WIE) programs around the United States are a crucial part of our country's response to the need for more women in engineering professions. For Women in Engineering (WIE) programs to be maximally effective, they must have access to validated assessment instruments for measuring the effectiveness of their recruitment and retention activities for women in engineering studies. Such assessment results can provide the basis for the development and revamping of effective activities designed to meet program objectives and missions. This paper reports the development and early results of a survey undertaken as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Assessing Women in Engineering (AWE) project. The instrument is designed to measure undergraduate women students' self-efficacy in studying engineering. Self-efficacy is "belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action necessary to manage prospective situations". Prior work from Blaisdell has shown that feelings of efficaciousness can be an important predictor in the success of women studying engineering. In our project, we developed a survey instrument designed to measure self-efficacy in engineering, feelings of inclusion and outcomes expectations, and collected responses from undergraduate women studying engineering at four institutions: Penn State University (PSU), Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), University of Texas -Austin (UT Austin) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
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