The underrepresentation of women in engineering education is a global challenge, but the challenges of recruiting women are not equal in different engineering disciplines and degree programs. This study aims to understand how young Finnish women’s interests in different kinds of engineering programs are constituted. A more elaborate view of subdisciplinary interests and their relationship is hoped to help in reaching out to a more diverse pool of applicants to the engineering programs. The data from 482 female upper secondary school students interested in engineering education opportunities were statistically analyzed to see how their interests in different kinds of engineering programs group together and interlink with each other. The results reveal a pattern worrisome to most of the traditional engineering programs. The interests not only seem to concentrate on few programs related to bio- and chemical engineering or architecture but the interest in the most popular cluster, bio- and chemical engineering, is also negatively connected to the interest in many other engineering fields.

Although the employment of graduates has been systematically surveyed in Finland for years, the gender equality aspect has been largely ignored. As early career experiences are likely to affect the retention of female engineers also in Finland, this study aims to understand better the different factors contributing to the vertical gender segregation in engineering careers in order to find ways to enhance women’s qualitative and quantitative employment. A statistical analysis of 3153 responses to a survey about degree and career satisfaction, career progress, factors contributing to employment, competences required in work, and development of competences during university studies revealed several differences in women’s and men’s early career experiences and perceptions. The results indicate that engineering education provides men with a better starting point for an engineering career. Hence, corrective actions are needed already during the engineering studies to smoothen the women’s rockier road in the later working life.

This innovative practice paper examines the impact of structured guidance on students’ thesis work process. Many engineering students focus on their professional future, and therefore do not understand the need to learn to research. Yet, the universities’ strong emphasis on scientific research, and the need for new generations of researchers requires that research skills are embedded also in the engineering curricula even at undergraduate level. As many engineering students are reluctant to read and write, the development of their scientific literacy skills requires many kinds of support. This paper describes pedagogical interventions implemented in a mechanical engineering bachelor’s thesis course to improve the quality of references of the theses and the completion of the thesis process in time. It also discusses the effects of systematic scaffolding of information literacy. Results show that the guided thesis process significantly improved the completion of bachelor’s thesis in the given time frame. However, statistically significant improvement in the quality and quantity of cited references could not be observed. This indicates that adding teaching sessions on information retrieval, scientific referencing, and scientific writing is not sufficient without close connection to the actual thesis supervision process performed by faculty.

This Work-in-Progress research paper presents the rationale and a plan to evaluate the applicability, validity, and reliability of Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI) in higher engineering education research and development. The ATI is a widely used, but also criticized, tool in higher education research in different disciplines, including engineering. This paper discusses the validity and reliability of the ATI as an instrument in general, and the applicability of the ATI in the discipline of engineering. A research plan to scrutinize the validity, reliability, and applicability of the ATI in engineering education is proposed, and the FIE community is invited to offer their expertise in developing and executing the plan.