Focus on Research
Penn State Intercom......November 27, 2002

Grant funds study of
Women in Engineering programs

Barbara Bogue, director of the Women in Engineering Program at Penn State, and Rose Marra, assistant professor of information science and learning technologies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, have received an $800,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop standardized assessment instruments to measure the effectiveness of women in engineering (WIE) programs nationwide.

Bogue and Marra will work with the WIE programs at Penn State, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Louisville. Collectively, these five programs represent both public and private institutions and varying degrees of WIE director experience and student body characteristics.

Bogue and Marra will develop assessment tools that will allow WIE directors to collect data on programs, evaluate programs and make decisions on how to revise programs and/or redistribute limited resources to maximize program effectiveness. Data from these instruments also will provide substantiated evidence for administrators, advisory boards and potential funding agencies of the value of WIE programs.

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