ITR: Women-friendly Environments for Learning Information Technology

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EIA-0082771Walters, DeborahSUNY at BuffaloITR: Women-Friendly Environments for Learning Information TechnologyThere is currently an unsatisfied national demand for people trained ininformation technology (IT) with a minority of the students enrolled in ITprograms being female. The proposed project is to develop an educationalapproach that will appeal to women and provide them with an appropriatelearning environment for IT courses. There are four components to theproject. First, will be efforts to build upon results of investigations onhow to use technology to increase learning and decrease costs as taughtwithin an IT fluency course. Second, will be research on learning stylesto provide quantitative evidence to explore the validity of learning stylesin general, and the consistency of women's learning styles, particularly,correlations between learning styles, learning environments andperformance. Third, will be research on how to improve Web-basedcollaborative experiences. Fourth, will be the testing of findings throughcomparisons of learning achieved in a traditional environment with learningin an environment restructured to take into account the project's findingsand those of other researchers in the field. The specific application ofthe project will be the development an a women-friendly information designand technology undergraduate certificate program that is accessible tostudents of any major. The introductory courses of the certificate programwill be designed so that students can move easily into either a traditionalcomputer science or media studies program.