The project GSE/EXT: Improving Climate, Instruction and Community to Recruit and Retain Undergraduate Women is a 12-month, $156,878 dollar award funded by the Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE) program's Extension Services (EXT) track. The primary goal of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a unified program of change for increasing the recruitment and retention of female undergraduate engineering students by improving the climate, instruction, and community (CIC) at three (3) institutions of higher education. The project team employs a model for creating institutional change that emphasizes training campus faculty and staff about mechanisms for improving CIC and supporting campus teams in the development of a gender diversity action plan for the engineering college This project builds on several current and prior NSF-funded projects (0227749; 0533520; 0646866; 0604468) as well as the current success of the "Assessing University Climate to Improve Retention for Undergraduate Engineering Students" project, a grant funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and referred to by the engineering community as the "Project to Assess Climate in Engineering" (PACE).
This team is lead by the Executive Director of the Women in Engineering Programs & Advocates Network, Inc. (WEPAN) in collaboration with investigators from the Stevens Institute of Technology's Center for Innovation in Science and Engineering Education (CIESE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity. There is a formative and summative project evaluation plan which is being conducted by an external evaluator, Patricia B. Campbell, from Campbell-Kibler Associates, Inc. There is also a dissemination plan which includes sharing the following deliverables: A gender diversity action plan template, training materials for improving CIC, and participant responses to training and action plan development.
