SWE - Winter 2008 - (Page 72)

CAREER TOOLBOX Ten Steps Toward a More Effective Outreach Program To successfully recruit girls into engineering, we have to know when our efforts work and when they need to be revamped. Here’s how. BY BARBARA BOGUE, SWE EDITORIAL BOARD iss! Miss!” exclaimed one of our Central Pennsylvania Junior Girl Scouts, waving her hand enthusiastically during a Q&A session. “Can boys be engineers?” she asked. When I responded, “Yes,” she was pleased. She thought her brother might be interested in engineering, too. Latitia had just heard a presentation on “What Do Engineers Do?” that followed hands-on activities for “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day.” She had spent the day making chocolate concrete and load-bearing paper bridges, and planning and modeling an accessible playground. All of the engineers she had seen that day were our student-leader role models. During the Q&A, she and her minicolleagues happily yelled out such responses as “engineers help people”; “engineers invent new stuff”; and “they get to solve mysteries.” Such are the joys of well-planned, well-executed, and well-assessed events. Ongoing assessment was a key factor in getting to such rewarding responses. Latitia and company were frequent attendees of a yearlong series of Girl Scout Saturdays that introduced girls to engineering through hands-on activities, provided leadership experience for undergraduate engineering women, and culminated in this event. (Many of the undergraduates were SWE Region G student members.) In early surveys, we discovered that the girls were having a great time building and problem solving, but they were not relating their enjoyment to engineering. In fact, we learned that girls who successfully built and launched a rocket didn’t learn that this was something aerospace engineers would do. We reported these results to our student leaders at the next training session and asked them to fix the “M problem. As a result, they made sure they constantly tied their instructions and demonstrations to engineering. It worked. We know, because the survey results told us so. All of which demonstrates a continuous-improvement cycle built on an assessment-driven set of activities. There’s nothing new here; assessment and continuous improvement are an integral part of our everyday projectmanagement lives. What may be news, however, is the application to engineering outreach activities. How often do we settle for the simple observation that kids are excited about the activities we provide as our sole data? How many of those girls go home never understanding that what they just had so much fun doing was engineering? If we are going to get the outcomes we want, it is vital to start assessing outreach activities effectively, and to use the results to make sure all the effort we put in works toward a common goal: to recruit more girls into engineering. Following are tips on how to integrate assessment into outreach activities: tices. Learn from the experience of others. 3 Define measurable objectives that focus on how to achieve your goal. Good objectives force us to consider and identify what it is we want to achieve and how we will know whether we did it. Vague objectives (e.g., “introduce girls to engineering role models”) assume that putting an engineer in front of a group of girls will produce the desired result but will fail to define how the use of role models will support the goal or measure success. A more-specific objective, such as “use active and engaging role models (student volunteers) to persuade girls to consider engineering as a career choice,” defines what the role models need to do (besides show up) and is measurable. An after-the-event, or post, survey can ask questions about whether girls think engineering is an interesting career or what kind of people they think are engineers. Using the same question on a pre, or beforethe-event, survey would yield even better information. 1 Fit assessment into planning from the beginning. Begin by identifying your goal (the overarching purpose) of the activity. For example, “introduce girls to engineering as a career that is rewarding and relevant to everyday life” is a common goal for outreach activities. 4 5 Design survey questions based on your objectives. If you want girls to understand that aerospace engineers can design and build rockets, simply ask, “Which engineers build rockets?” on your survey. 2 Benchmark. Invest the time to find out what others have done. Others have probably created activities to achieve the goals you have identified. Googling “engineering outreach activities” (scholar.google.com) yields 27,600 titles in .16 seconds. WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network) Proceedings are full of innovative ideas (www.wepan.org). Copy and adapt successful ideas and prac- Leverage your resources by using the ready-made SWE-AWE precollege surveys (www.swe.org/awe). These surveys are tested, address typical outreach activity goals and objectives, and are easily adaptable to your activity or organization. All are available as online or downloadable Word documents. Benchmarking can also uncover good examples of surveys. Just make sure that borrowed surveys address your objectives so that the results are relevant. 72 SWE WINTER 2008 http://www.swe.org/awe http://www.scholar.google.com http://www.wepan.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of SWE - Winter 2008

SWE - Winter 2008 Heritage Club President’s Note View from the Executive Suite Editor’s Page Readers’ Forum EWeek 2008 New Faces of Engineering The Leaky Science and Engineering Pipeline Why Do Women Leave the Engineering Work Force? A Greener America = New Growth Fields for Engineers The Off-On Ramp Revolution Recognizing the Historic Contributions of African-Americans Membership Information & Calendar A&B Women in Tune with Technology: SWE 2007 Conference Overview Keynote Address Achievement Award Region, Section, and Collegiate Awards SME Bowl and SWE Anniversaries Engineering World: Point of View: Why I Blog Career Toolbox Book Review SWE Smiles Opportunity Index SWE Scrapbook

SWE - Winter 2008

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