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Background Women and minorities remain significantly underrepresented in the undergraduate engineering disciplines despite decades-long recruitment and retention efforts. As United States demographics shift and the nation continues to recognize the value of workplace diversity, engineering education stakeholders continue to seek ways to increase participation of women and minority students.Purpose Our research examines the following question: For Hispanic women whose parents have limited educational attainment, what available sources of potential social capital do they identify, and by what means do they access and activate these resources in their decisions to select and persist in engineering as a college major? We hope to provide insights for United States institutions that serve Hispanic students, as well as those seeking to diversify their student body.Design/method Utilizing Lin's network theory of social capital as a framework, we employed semi-structured interviews in a multiple case study research methodology, taking a constructivist epistemological view.Results Three major findings are that (1) lack of available family social capital was supplemented mostly by school personnel; (2) delayed recognition or identification of available resources slowed access and activation of resources, leading to difficult university transitions; and (3) if accessed and activated, peer groups and institutional support systems provided sources of social capital.Conclusions Even single instances or weak ties can be effective in bridging gaps in engineering-related social capital. Facilitating opportunities for students to develop sustained social capital may have potential to attract and retain underrepresented students in engineering.

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This paper describes a mixed‐methods study employing a social cognitive theoretical framework that emphasizes the interplay of person factors, environment, and behavior to explore the educational experiences of female students in an ethnically diverse learning environment. Specifically, we investigate the relations of ethnicity to female students' perceptions and experiences related to engineering, as well as their selection of and persistence in undergraduate engineering majors. An ethnically diverse sample of female engineering undergraduates at an urban research university completed an online survey and participated in semi‐structured interviews. Results revealed that participants of all ethnicities perceived strong institutional and peer supports in this diverse learning environment. Additionally, differences in participants' perceived barriers for achieving engineering educational and career plans were found based on ethnicity and parental level of education.

This study addressed the impact of a semester-long course called Learning to Learn, an undergraduate psychology course designed to teach college students to be self-regulated learners. Results of pretesting and posttesting of 78 students with the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1993) provided support for the intervention. Mean differences and correlational results suggest that students increased in their mastery orientation to learning and their self-efficacy for learning, increased in their valuing of the course and in cognitive strategy use, and declined in test anxiety over the term. These findings suggest that an intervention that targets a range of cognitive and motivational components can have utility for college students and that there is value to a stand-alone course in learning to learn at the college level.