First year engineering students are strikingly impoverished in their self-concept as professional engineers

Fred is Co-Principal Investigator and Director of The Full Potential Initiative, an NSF-funded longitudinal study of the development and influence of implicit attitudes about intellectual ability and academic belonging. His findings have demonstrated that biased implicit associations in the minds of students, teachers and professionals are not simple functions of the stereotypes in their environment, but vary predictably with their personal experiences and identities. Female and male scientists, for example, differ greatly in the strength of their implicit stereotype of science as male (weak stereotyping among the women but strong among the men), even though they are both equally aware of the cultural stereotype. A key ongoing focus of his research is on the causal role that such varying implicit associations may play in shaping identities and contributing to perseverance in scientific studies and careers. Fred’s publication topics have included comparisons of weband laboratory-based implicit cognition experiments, the relationship between implicit and explicit attitude measures, ethnic and gender differences in science graduation at selective colleges, and standardized testing in college admission.