Attitudes of Engineering Students from Underrepresented Groups Toward Service-Learning (original) (raw)

Ongoing student surveys, supplemented by interviews, reveal that service in general and servicelearning (S-L) in particular are more attractive to those from underrepresented groups in engineering than to their counterparts. Courses with service-learning projects have been integrated into existing required courses in engineering over the past six years in five departments at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Entering engineering students have been sampled every fall with a "pre" survey, and then all students are surveyed "post" at the end of the spring semester. Evidence continues to mount of the significant difference in responses in attitudes toward community service and S-L in engineering with women especially and to a lesser extent other minorities in engineering. Voluntary participation in S-L projects involving work with and in developing countries continues to attract females at a rate of more than 3 times their underlying population. The results of these ongoing S-L courses and surveys point to a growing difference by gender in response to community service in general and service-learning in particular. If the engineering profession wants to attract and retain more people from underrepresented groups, more servicelearning in engineering appears to be one approach.