Exploring bias in mechanical engineering students' perceptions of classmates.

Shima Salehi,N G Holmes,Carl Wieman,Cassidy Rose Sugimoto

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0212477

Shima Salehi, N G Holmes + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212477

Copy DOI

Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Mar 7, 2019
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Stanford University, Cornell University

Abstract

Gender disparity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is an on-going challenge. Gender bias is one of the possible mechanisms leading to such disparities and has been extensively studied. Previous work showed that there was a gender bias in how students perceived the competence of their peers in undergraduate biology courses. We examined whether there was a similar gender bias in a mechanical engineering course. We conducted the study in two offerings of the course, which used different instructional practices. We found no gender bias in peer perceptions of competence in either of the offerings. However, we did see that the offerings’ different instructional practices affected aspects of classroom climate, including: the number of peers who were perceived to be particularly knowledgeable, the richness of the associated network of connections between students, students’ familiarity with each other, and their perceptions about the course environment. These results suggest that negative bias against female students in peer perception is not universal, either across institutions or across STEM fields, and that instructional methods may have an impact on classroom climate.

Highlights

While gender disparity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields has been studied extensively during the last decade [1,2,3,4], attempts to increase the representation of females in STEM disciplines through classroom interventions have led to mixed results [5]
The variations in the offerings were not experimentally designed by the authors, but rather predetermined by the departmental constraints of these two offerings. These variations allowed us to examine the generalizability of potential peer perception bias in mechanical engineering courses, and to examine variations in students’ perception of their peers in different classroom environments, as hypothesized by Grunspan et al We examined students’ perception of the classroom environment itself across these two offerings to probe the impact of the classroom environment or context on the biases and nomination networks
Grunspan et al observed a bias against female students by their male classmates in perceived knowledge of the subject

Summary

Introduction

While gender disparity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields has been studied extensively during the last decade [1,2,3,4], attempts to increase the representation of females in STEM disciplines through classroom interventions have led to mixed results [5]. There are multiple possible mechanisms for these gender disparities at the undergraduate level, including general societal perceptions and stereotypes, and local factors such as perceived classroom and departmental norms and practices [7]. The latter often reflect social cognitive factors such as implicit bias, stereotype threat, and others [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Such implicit bias in college classrooms can have a significant impact on the chilly climate [17] for women in male-majority fields such as physical sciences and engineering [18]

Methods

Results

Conclusion