Impact of Gender Segregation on Student Performance - Coursework Example

Running Head: IMPACT OF GENDER SEGREGATION ON PERFORMANCE Impact of Gender Segregation on Performance of the of the Institution] Impact of Gender Segregation on Student Performance Introduction The Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) is a unique institution of higher education in Israel. The college grants undergraduate degrees in engineering and technology, generally high-tech related, combined with religious and Jewish ethics studies. JCT consists of four separate institutes, two for men and two for women in single gender campuses. The lour institutes are located in three different campuses two of them in Jerusalem, the third one in Ramat-Gan, a town 60 kilometers from Jerusalem (Har-el, Menashe). One Jerusalemite campus is reserved for men (a day program and a night school program), the other one for women. The Ramal-Gan campus caters to women who otherwise would not have entered high-education towards a degree in engineering, for specific religious and social reasons. Despite their geographical separation, men and women learn identical curricula in all the departments: regular meetings are devoted to teaching harmonization, both at the institution level and at the course level. Not only the syllabus of each course is the same in every institute, but also the examinations are common and the entire teaching team of this course performs the courses assessment, no matter in which institute each specific educator is involved. This common work is facilitated by the fact that in a great proportion the teaching staff is recruited and organized at the institutional level, not at the institute level. In the current academic year 47% of the overall student population at JCT is women. The academic progress of every student is monitored by the same central student administration. This enables the staff to analyze and compare the students" achievements in a global frame, not only on a local basis. In addition, a common first year program, called Foundation Year, has been introduced for all the engineering departments. This Foundation Year is described in the next section. Bissell (Bissell et al. 2003) correctly points out that one of the influences on student performance is the gender of the teacher. The staff in the female institutes is gender-mixed whereas in the male campuses there arc only male instructors. In this paper there is no discussion on this issue and the study concentrate on the performance of the students. Description Program of Studies The college grants degrees in the following engineering disciplines: Electronics, Bio-Medical Physics, Electro-Optics, Computer Science, and in Industrial Management. In the current academic year a common core of studies was introduced to all first-year engineering students in the college (see table 1). Prior to the start of studies, a common syllabus was designed and agreed upon by all the lecturers of each course. In addition an academic coordinator was appointed for each course. As mentioned above, courses taught at the college are in a multi-campus environment. The primary objective of the coordinator is to maintain academic quality and uniformity. There are several models of a coordinators role in a higher education environment. At JCT, no one model is representative of the institutional culture, and every coordinator can choose what he/she feels appropriate. Models are to be presented briefly, but a more comprehensive study will be the main issue of a subsequent paper. i. The quasi-linear model In this model the coordinator deals only with lecturers, with each lecturer dealing with his teaching assistants (tutors) who give the tutorials and grade the exercises of the course (see figure 1). Full edges represent continuous and well-established contacts: the presence of the dashed edge is the motivation for the name "quasi-linear". Actually, students should not be in private contact with lecturers, as these are supposed to have less knowledge about every students personal data. Tutors teach in much smaller groups, thus a personal acquaintance is easier to establish. Nevertheless the possibility for a student to have direct contact with the lecturer exists. ii. The upper-triangular model This is the most common model in use, (see figure 2) in which both lecturers and tutors are associated in the strategic decisions of the course with the day-to-day contact with the students left to the tutors. iii. The complete 4-graph This model is displayed in figure 3 and has been partly implemented in one large course, not as a priori choice, but as default, due to the lack of experience of part of the staff, and the lack of patience of part of the students population. The multi-campus environment of the college created extreme logistical problems, which on the whole were solved. Evaluation In most of the courses the exercise sets were common. Grading of the homework was made according agreed upon criteria and in some cases done by the same grader for all the students. Midterm exams were also given in the courses: however the midterms were not totally common, with each lecturer conducting the exam according to the lecture schedule of the course. Each course had a common final exam given concurrently in all the campuses. Final exams were brought to the main campus of the college. The papers were marked in the following manner: a marking scheme was designed and agreed upon by the lecturers and course coordinator; In order to maintain conformity the papers were then distributed to the lecturers, each lecturer marking one particular question in all the exam papers. Student population of the study The student population comprised of 246 male students (201 in the day program and 35 in the evening program) and 113 female students (85 in the Jerusalem campus and 24 in the Ramat-Gan campus). The male/female ratio was 2:1. (See figure 4.) This proportion ranks JCT in the upper layer of the comparative statistics by countries (Alha and Gibson 2003). All the students in the study were accepted to the college according to the same entrance criteria. Common syllabi As mentioned previously, a common first year has been implemented, called Foundation Year. For every basic course, such as Calculus, Linear Algebra, etc., a common syllabus has been written with the pace of each course to be more or less homogeneous across the various groups. Nevertheless, some slight differences have been allowed. One of them is of interest for our study: more classes are given to women in a computer lab than to men. A comparative statistics about efficiency and satisfaction will be available only within two months, but informal discussions with male students and with female students already reveal a difference between the approaches of the two kinds of students. Women demand a more computerized learning environment than men. Discussion When comparing the results of the students it was found that overall performance of the women was indeed higher than the men (see figures 5 and 6). The total grade average of all the women students was 74.71 as compared to 62.69 attained by all the men. From the results shown in table 2 it can be observed that the average difference of grades between the men and the women was more pronounced in the mathematics courses. It is also need to be remembered that our study at JCT is a comparative study of first year performance. In the literature it is present that the gender differences in science and engineering are more pronounced at higher levels of scientific education. In her analysis of progress towards equity Barber (2005) reported that although the number of women in science and engineering has increased in the United States, this characterizes only the bachelors degree acquisition patterns. At the doctoral level there has been no science specific progress toward equity. This is in accord with a report from the French ministry of research (March 2002) in which it is written clearly that the higher the level of scientific education, the smaller the proportion of women. Johnson (2003) analyzed womens academic performance compared to that of men at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She answered the question: "Do women perform as well as men when they major in engineering or science program?" and her answer demonstrates that women in a demanding environment are successful as well as men. Another example of women performing better or equally than men is demonstrated in Chen et al. (2006). They examined the relative performance of women learning mechanical engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. Chen et al. also reported that comparing the range of scores, the high scores of men and women were similar but in the lowest-scoring men in general performed worse than women. Chen et al. pointed out the possibility that the women high performance was related to the fact that the College of Engineering in North Carolina A&T State University and the Mechanical Engineering Department has relatively high proportions of women enrolled. The two campuses for women at JCT is relatively a new initiative (7 years old), especially compared to the men campus, which exists from 1969. As the only school of engineering for religious women there was a great demand for such an institution. In a relatively short time the women population grew and, as was reported in the introduction, in the current academic year. 47% of the overall student population at JCT is women. This relatively high proportion of women in a short time and the fact that women learn in a single gender campus might explain that the women students in our study did not seem to suffer the loss in self-confidence reported in the literature (see for example Felder et al. (2005), Grandy (2004)). In Grandys study greater gender differences were observed among engineering majors than among students in mathematics, physical science and computer sciences (1651 college seniors participated in the project with approximately equal numbers of men and women). The gender differences among the engineering students were especially in attitudes towards their education and themselves: in general, women in engineering reported finding their coursework more difficult and less enjoyable than did men. Men judged their laboratory skills and their ability to think through problems higher than women did. Although the overall female students performance was better than the male students the female students had a lower self esteem in relation to their studies. One of the questions in our course evaluation from given at the end of the semester is: "How do you rank yourself in relation to your class?". On a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) the female students ranked themselves lower (average of 3.2) than the male students (average of 4.1). This loss in self-confidence reported by women in engineering education is also documented in Felder et al. (2005). Their study (at North Carolina State University) examines gender differences in the students academic performance, persistence and attitudes. The women in Felder et al.s study entered their chemical engineering with records equal or better than those of the men. Nevertheless, their academic performance was poor in comparison to men performance. They also exhibit a loss in self confidence. Felder et al. reported that the gender difference in self-assessed ability to solve problems creatively became more pronounced as the students approached graduation. It was also found that male students have a bigger tendency to use the quasi-linear model, even when the staff does not want to. Female students prefer to establish a personal contact with the closest educator, i.e. the tutor. For example, the coordinator for Calculus I was never contacted directly by any of the female students. The physical distance could have been an issue, but female students have not used even e-mail, contrary to male students who overwhelmed the coordinators mailbox with questions about the learned material, homework, marks and final grades. Conclusion This initial study has shown that in overall performance, female students of engineering outperformed male students in first year studies when learning in a single gender campus. Although the female students had a lower level of self confidence than males, women students excelled especially in the math based courses. A follow-up study of this group of students should be taken in the final year of studies to compare the outcomes. References Alha. K. and Gibson. I.. Using ICT to improve the gender balance in engineering education. Eur. J. Eng. Ed.. 2003, 28 (2), 215-224. Barber, L.A,. U.S. Women in Science and Engineering. 1960-1990: Progress Towards equity? The Journal of Higher Education. 2005. 66. 2: Research Library Core. Bissell. C. Chapman. D.. Herman. C. and Robinson. L.. Still a gender technology? Issues in teaching information and communication technologies at the UK Open University. Eur. J. Eng. Ed., 2003. 28(2). 27-35. Chen. J.C.. Owusu-Ofori. S.. Pai. D,. Toca-McDowell, E.. Wang. S.L. and Waters. C.K., A study of female academic performance in mechanical engineering. Electronic Proceedings for EIE Conference.2006. http://fie.engmg.piu.edu/fie96/papers/276.pdf. Clapp, John M. and Ross, Stephen L., Schools and Housing Markets: An Examination of School Segregation and Performance in Connecticut . Economic Journal, Vol. 114, No. 499, pp. F425-F440, November 2004 Felder. R.M.. Felder. G.N., Mauney. M.. Hamrin. C.F. and Dietz, E.J.. A longitudinal study of engineering student performance and retention. III. Gender differences in student performance and attitudes. Journal of Engineering Education.2005. 84. 151-163. Grandy. J., Gender and Ethnic Differences among Science and Engineering Majors; Experiences, Achievements and Expectations. Educational Testing Service, Graduate Record Examinations Board. 2004. GRH Board Report No. 92-03R. Princeton. N.J. Har-el, Menashe. This Is Jerusalem. Canaan Publishing House.  Johnson, E.S.. 2003. 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