Project Lead: Negar Mohaghegh Harandi, School of Biomedical Engineering
Project co-leads: Agnes d’Entremont, Associate Professor of Teaching at Mech Eng. agnes.dentremont@mech.ubc.ca;
Pete Ostafichuk, Professor of Teaching at Mechanical Eng. peter.ostafichuk@ubc.ca;
Christoph Sielmann, Assistant Professor of Teaching at Mechanical Eng. christoph.sielmann@ubc.ca
Project description
Engineering programs overall have under representation of women, but variations exist between programs. Recent statistical analysis of data from UBC’s Engineering discipline ranking process found that women with high-average grades have a different pattern in ranking the Engineering disciplines compared to their male counterparts [1]. This suggests student decision-making for competitive program placement differs by gender. In this project, we seek to explore our preliminary results further by conducting interviews with students. We plan to use qualitative methods to draw more concrete conclusions on why women students tend to avoid certain traditional Engineering programs altogether.
[1] Adam et al, Relationship Between Grades and Gender in Student Program preferences in Eng., CEEA 2024.
Research questions
We are planning to run interviews with the first-year engineering students just after they rank the engineering programs at the end of their first year to answer the following two research questions:
What factors affect the choice of engineering programs for students in the first common year of the Engineering program at UBC?
Is there any difference in these factors between students by grade band and gender?
The students will be chosen from the APSC 101 course from all genders, and different grade bands: Top performing (90%+), high achieving (80%-89%), satisfactory (70%-79%).