Self-assessed confidence in EC-2000 outcomes: a study of gender and ethnicity differences across institutions

With the establishment of the challenging Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC-2000) accreditation guidelines, institutions must obtain a more informed understanding of students' underlying knowledge, skills, and attitudes as they begin, matriculate, and eventually complete their engineering studies. As engineering educators collect information about how students demonstrate achievement in the "a-k" outcomes, questions arise as to whether differences exist between student groups, specifically gender and ethnicity differences. Such differences may potentially affect a student's performance and persistence in engineering. Prior research indicates that engineering students' initial attitudes, along with gender and ethnicity, are linked to first term probation and retention in the freshman year. How they are linked to achievement of the EC-2000 outcomes is still an open question. At the University of Pittsburgh, we are investigating how confidence in the outcomes changes throughout a student's undergraduate engineering career and how these self-assessed outcomes correlate with other 'a-k' outcome metrics. As part of the larger study, the paper explores the issue of how confidence in the outcomes is influenced by gender and ethnicity factors at the freshman level. Using the Pittsburgh Freshman Engineering Attitude Post-Survey/sup TM/ and data from 16 US engineering schools, who took the questionnaire during the 1998-99 academic year, we have found a number of significant and consistent differences in the 11 outcomes with respect to student gender and ethnicity.