Bridge Courses
Technology bridge courses improve retention of women and minorities by boosting technical building-block skills.
A four-day summer program for freshman female engineering students at Arizona State University led to improved retention rates of participants: 70% to 80%, compared with 60% for women not in the program.
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Fletcher, Shawna, Dana Newell, Leyla Newton, Mary Anderson-Rowland, "The WISE Summer Bridge Program: Assessing Student Attrition, Retention, and Program Effectiveness," Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition. |
Learn the questions to ask when developing a bridge program in your school.
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Jenkins, Davis, "Bridge Program Planning Guide", Workforce Strategy Center, 2004, 5 pp. |
At Pennsylvania State University, an intensive preparation program for minorities in engineering retained 73% of its participants until graduation -- twice the rate of minority students not in the program. Read about the strategies that led to its success.
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Persaud, Anita, Amy L. Freeman, "Creating a Successful Model for Minority Students' Success in Engineering: The PREF Summer Bridge Program," WEPAN / NAMEPA 2005 Joint National Conference. |
More than three-quarters of women who took an introductory spatial skills course were retained, compared to 48% of the women who didn't take the course. Find out what worked at one College of Engineering. See also the Spatial Reasoning Software developed by author Sheryl Sorby.
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Sorby, Sheryl, "Gender Differences in Spatial Reasoning Skills and their Effects on Success," The Michigan Tech Project: Phase 1--Initial Development, Michigan Technological University. |
A two-hour workshop on spatial reasoning with accompanying visualization software completely eliminated significant gender differences in spatial reasoning abilities among a group of University of California at Berkeley engineering students.
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Copyright © 1995 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Reprinted from, Agogino, A.M. and S. Hsi, "Learning Style Based Innovations to Improve Retention of Female Engineering Students in the Synthesis Coalition," (Engineering Education for the 21st Century: Proceedings of Frontiers in Education, FIE'95, ASEE/IEEE, pp. 4a2.). This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the products or services of the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology & Science (IWITTS). Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it. |
The WomenTech Educators Training got us thinking intentionally about who we were going to target for outreach, how we were going to target them, and how we would follow up to make sure we had actual results linked to the different programs and events that we were holding. Since then, it has grown organically and blossomed into something that our college just does naturally.
I think getting together as a team with intention—because we're all so busy—and developing a written plan that we could stick to was what made all the difference. I don’t think we would have ever done that if it wasn't for the WomenTech Educators Training.