Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation investigates the gender disparity in the engineering related fields through three studies. The first study investigates the role of interest in the gender disparity through ACT data over a 30 year period. This study indicated that female interest in engineering related fields has consistently been much lower over this period of time than it has been for male students. Further, results indicate that those who do express interest in engineering related fields are often under prepared. The second study investigated the role of Utah school counselors in the gender disparity. A survey was conducted that established a clear difference between what Utah school counselors believed to be the values and personality characteristics of an engineer based on gender. The last study used this information to inform a nationally distributed vignette that determined that it is likely that school counselors work with students may differ based on the student's gender and perceived personality attributes. This information seems to confirm the need for continued education for both educators and students as to biases and stereotypes that may be influencing female interest in engineering related fields

Gender disparity in engineering: results and analysis from school counselors survey and national vignette

pre-printIn an earlier paper by our group [1] we presented statistical analysis based on 30 years of ACT data illustrating gender disparity in engineering majors and career choices. Obtained results also revealed the presence of a large number of students who are interested in engineering but who may not be adequately prepared to pursue a successful career in this discipline. Because of the role of school counselors as "gate keepers" of both academic information and career planning options, further understanding of the role of school counselors in the longstanding gender disparity in the engineering field has been established as an important avenue for interventions to help reverse a continued declining trend of female participation in STEM related fields. This paper describes results of a survey that is specifically targeted school counselors and their knowledge of engineering and the social influences that may affect their guidance approach for female students. To help delve further into the attitudes of school counselors regarding the issue of gender disparity, a vignette was developed for national distribution, and results from this effort will also presented in this paper

Women in engineering: statistical analysis of ACT data and proposed procedure to reverse trend

Journal ArticleWomen have historically been underrepresented both in college majors and professional careers in STEM fields. This disparity can be observed in many countries, though it is most evident in the US. In this paper we analyze historical ACT data over a 30-year span and correlate gender differences with ACT scores and expressed interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) related college majors. SPSS software was used to analyze the data and examine the historical trends of students' expressed interest in STEM related majors. Results show that there is a significant discrepancy between the number of men and women students who expressed interest in engineering majors. The data also show that social influences such as the emergence of computer fields including computer gaming and the dot.com era have profound influence in students' interest in STEM fields. To help develop specific strategies for timely remediation and help specific strategies for timely remediation and help reverse this trend students were grouped into three categories -- well prepared (ACT ? 28), under prepared (27 ? ACT ? 19), and unprepared (ACT < 19). Of the total number of students who expressed interest in engineering majors there are many who appear either completely unprepared or relatively under prepared for the demands of these fields. Results from this analysis demonstrate the importance of earlier interventions to encourage students who still have enough time to prepare for opportunities that interest them. It is also probable that students are making college major choices based on little or no data, and may, therefore, be at retention risk if they are admitted into an engineering program. This paper also highlights ongoing efforts to share data and work with high school counselors in an effort to help students identify more realistic career options or to timely target students for effective math remediation and help encourage increased participation in STEM majors and careers. Based on the data found in these analyses, we will next be surveying high school career guidance counselors. This survey will help gain insight into the high school counselors' understanding and potential biases regarding engineering and engineers

Gender differences in expressed interests in engineering-related fields over a 30-year span

Journal ArticleThis study examines gender differences and historical trends of high school student interest in engineering based on ACT data on expressed interest compared with that of students' and ability. Changes have been observed in the interest in engineering fields over time most likely because of societal influences. These influences are especially seen in computer related fields causing speculation that both males and females were influenced by the dot com era but that only male interest was piqued due to the rise of computer games in the late 1990's. Another interesting observation is the number of students stating they are interested in engineering careers but who minimally or poorly prepared based on their ACT math scores. This raises the question of whether these students understand what engineering is, and whether they have been informed of the demands of the major. These students are likely to face retention issues in engineering fields and are often candidates for math remediation. By better understanding the societal influences as well as gender and ability disparities we will have a better understanding of what needs to be done in order to reverse the current trends of gender disparity and lack of interest in engineering fields

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Tear film stability: A review

Tear film stability can be assessed via a number of tools designed for clinical as well as research purposes. These techniques can give us insights into the tear film, and allow assessment of conditions that can lead to dry eye symptoms, and in severe cases, to significant ocular surface damage and deterioration of vision. Understanding what drives tear film instability and its assessment is also crucial for evaluating existing and new therapies. This review examines various techniques that are used to assess tear film instability: evaluation of tear break-up time and non-invasive break-time; topographic and interferometric techniques; confocal microscopic methods; aberrometry; and visual function tests. It also describes possible contributions of different tear film components; namely meibomian lipids, ocular mucins and proteins, and factors such as age, contact lens wear, ocular surgery and environmental stimuli, that may influence tear film instability

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press