Looking to Jordan to Improve STEM Education in the United States (2015)

Undergraduates: Fareeda Zikry, Samantha Harrington and Kathleen Borden

Faculty Advisor: Catherine Scott
Department: Global Studies

---

Our research provides new fundamental understandings and analyses of the differences in women's preparation, attitude, and interest in pursuing STEM fields at the university level in the United States and Jordan. Our research proposes an understanding of why the Jordan education system has been successful in attracting female students to undergraduate engineering programs, and how this can be applied to improving female STEM enrollment and gender equity in the United States. There are essential factors in the Jordanian academic environment that have yielded a significantly higher, in comparison with the United States, enrollment rate in engineering undergraduate programs, and those factors remain largely unexplored in the engineering education and STEM policy literature. The specific research question we focus on is: what are the dominant factors that have resulted in Jordan having STEM enrollments that are almost twice of that of the United States. Our findings include a summary and analysis of the cultural differences between women from the United States and from Jordan pursuing STEM degrees. We investigated this discrepancy by conducting a qualitative assessment of female undergraduate engineering enrollment at University of Jordan in Amman the summer of 2014, through the VIMY Global Team Award through the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill.