– Curricular emphases, instructional approaches, and co-curricular participation that affected learning outcomes differently by gender.
– Greater curricular emphasis on professional skills and a greater frequency of student-centered teaching led to greater self-reported design skills for women.
– Being more active in nonengineering clubs increased female students’ self-reports of fundamental, design, and communication skills.
– Women self-reported lower fundamental and design skills than men, after controlling for other student characteristics and experiences.
– Design skills, which are the ability to solve more ill-structured and open-ended problems, had a weaker but negative relationship with women.
– Small-group experiences enhance the attitudes and achievements of women in STEM fields.
– Female students that more often reported that their instructors used student-centered teaching methods reported higher design skills, unlike the relationship between this pedagogy and design skills for male students.
– Women self-reported higher communication skills, but not leadership and teamwork skills, after controlling for other student characteristics.
– As with fundamental and design skills, women who engaged more actively in nonengineering clubs had higher self-assessments of communication skills. These results demonstrate the value in offering such co-curricular experiences to promote women engineers’ learning outcomes.
– Men reported higher leadership skills than women when students experienced a curriculum emphasizing core engineering thinking.
– Women reported higher leadership skills when they had curricula with stronger emphasis on professional skills, men reported higher leadership skills when they had curricula more strongly focused on core engineering thinking.
* Differences in gender within different Engineering curriculums.