Does gender affect student perception of engineering courses in a common first year program?

Abstract

In the fall of 2000, Michigan Technological University started a common first year program for all engineering students. In conjunction with the student course evaluations, the students answered ten additional questions. These questions were used to evaluate their perception of the first 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 time on the course The students were asked to report their gender. When the data were analyzed, there were significant differences between the male and female students. For instance, the women tended to spend more time on homework and report that this amount of work was not excessive. The men reported the opposite. The women tended to rank their ability to use the tools taught in the class lower 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. It investigates how the data changed over time and how gender may have affected student response.