AWE (Assessing Women & Men in Engineering)
Purpose and History

AWE, the Assessing Women and Men in Engineering Project, provides assessment tools for people involved in K-16 formal and informal educational outreach activities. AWE assessment tools provide researchers and evaluators with high quality data and the possibility of meta-data based on comparisons of responses to consistent quantitative surveys from a variety of organizations or activities.

All products are available upon completing a brief, free registration.

AWE surveys are designed for use by implementers of SET educational activities that reach out to both pre-college and college participants, university and college-level administrators, faculty and directors of Women in Engineering and other professional or co-curricular programs.

AWE surveys are designed to understand whether formal or informal educational activities are achieving the desired goals. AWE surveys are tested and many are easily personalized to both formal and informal educational activities.

AWE, an NSF-funded project, is now a part of SWE, the Society of Women Engineers. (NSF HRD 0120642, 0734072). SWE AWE, together with the National Girl’s Collaborative Project, expands the target audience beyond colleges and universities to industry, informal and formal SET (science, engineering and technology) education activities.

SWE AWE is currently adding new and updating new research overviews in collaboration with the National Academy of Engineering CASEE-The Center for Advancement of Scholarship in Engineering Education. This the CASEE Information Sheets and AWE Literature Overview Suites.

AWE support tools include:

• K-16 exportable surveys
• Literature Overviews—Browse these to find out more about the literature in gender equity and related topics
• ADAPT (AWE Database for Activity and Participant Tracking)—a national data collection tool (in development. Beta test Fall 2008).
• Spreadsheets for survey data entry
• Tips on assessment, Institutional Review Board proposals, etc.
• Much more

AWE Product List – A complete list of AWE assessment products and tools

AWE surveys are easily accessible as paper downloads on AWEonline.org, following a quick, free registration. Versions for online data collection are also available.

Find out more:
AWEonline.org – Registration

AWE Overview Slides

AWE Personnel
Barbara Bogue, Penn State, Director
Rose M. Marra, University of Missouri, Research Director
Syed Karimushan, Penn State, AWE Web Developer
Tricia Berry, University of Texas at Austin, AWE Training Consultant
Betty Shanahan, SWE, SWE AWE Co-PI
Chia-Lin Tsai, University of Missouri, AWE/NGCP Graduate Research Assistant

AWE Project History
AWE was founded in 2001, supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research on Gender in Engineering and Science  (GSE) grant. It received subsequent supplemental funding. Co-PIs and directors are Barbara Bogue, Penn State, and Rose Marra, University of Missouri,

In 2008, we were awarded an NSF GSE diffusion grant to move the AWE Project to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) as its permanent home. Barbara Bogue is the PI and Rose Marra and Betty Shanahan, Executive Director of SWE, are co-PIs of the SWE AWE grant.

In 2007, AWE signed on as a partnering organization for the NSF-Funded National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) Extension services project. Through this initiative, the AWE project developed an updated set of STEM outreach pre-college assessment tools and is working to build assessment capacity with organizations offering these activities.

In 2006, AWISE-Assessing Women and Men in Student Environments, was funded by NSF GSE to move assessment into engineering classrooms. The project works with three departments at Penn State (Mechanical and Nuclear, Industrial and Manufacturing and Engineering Science and Mechanics) to measure and better understand the experience of women in engineering learning environments. Rose Marra is PI and Barbara Bogue is co-PI.

The original AWE Project brought together collaboration among 7 institutions that worked together to develop and field test AWE survey and instruments and other products. AWE Partner institutions represent a broad spectrum of institutions including public and privates, large and small, and institutions with a range of ethnic diversity.

These AWE institutions and representative personnel were:
Rose M. Marra, Ph.D. (Co-PI)
Associate Professor of Learning Technologies
University of Missouri

Barbara Bogue, M.Sc. (Co-PI)
Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Women in Engineering
Penn State University

Tricia Berry
Director of the Women in Engineering Program
The University of Texas at Austin

Brenda Hart
Director of Student Affairs
Speed School of Engineering
University of Louisville

Marie-Elena Reyes
Kathy Powell
WISE Program Coordinator, Senior
Department of Women's Studies
University of Arizona

Barbara Ruel
Director of Women in Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Mimi Philobos
Director of Women in Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Whitney Edmister
Assistant Director
Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity
Virginia Tech

AWE Advisors

Jane Daniels, PhD, The Henry Luce Foundation
Clare Booth Luce Program

Cinda-Sue Davis, PhD
Director, Women in Science and Engineering Program
University of Michigan

Sheila Edwards Lange, Ph.D
Associate Director for Research, Center for Workforce Development
University of Washington

Barbara Lazarus  (deceased)
Associate Provost for Academic Affairs
Carnegie Mellon University