EngageIT: Building Capacity in Community Colleges to Recruit and Retain Underrepresented Students in Computing

多元化、受过良好教育的计算和信息技术（CS/IT）劳动力对美国的福祉至关重要。社区学院独特的包容性和开放性使命使其成为干预的关键点。 位于博尔德的科罗拉多大学的“EngageIT”项目将为社区学院的CS/IT教师开发和测试一种专业发展模式，以建立他们招募和留住妇女和代表性不足的少数民族的能力。 该项目将调查学生在CS/IT学科中的持续性，以衡量PD的有效性，并为教师提供特定项目的多样性数据。该项目将包括三个活动：（1）设计一个可扩展的，基于研究的PD课程;（2）在两个教师群体中实施该课程;（3）跟踪学生在该学科中的持续性，以评估PD的有效性。 该项目将利用国家妇女信息技术中心（NCWIT）的大量专业知识和网络，包括基于研究的招聘和保留做法，1500多个学生参与课程库（EngageCSEdu），专门的社区学院咨询委员会和社会科学家来支持该项目。这项研究将采用混合方法，这将使三角测量和综合数据分析，这是无法通过简单的定量或定性研究。 基于规则的评估将为每位教师提供PD实施的客观衡量标准。 评估前和后PD将占教师可能已经在参与本项目之前实施的参与实践的不同水平。 研究结果将有助于教育工作者了解CS/IT中学生的差异化坚持以及教师在该领域多样化中所扮演的角色，有助于为不同的学生提供更具吸引力的学习环境，并导致更多样化的美国技术劳动力。

A diverse, well-educated computing and information technology (CS/IT) workforce is vital to U.S. well-being. The unique inclusive and open-access mission of community colleges makes them crucial points of intervention. The "EngageIT" project at the University of Colorado at Boulder will develop and test a model of professional development (PD) for community college CS/IT faculty that builds their capacity to recruit and retain women and underrepresented minorities. The project will investigate student persistence in CS/IT disciplines to measure the effectiveness of the PD and to empower faculty with program-specific diversity data.This project will consist of three activities: (1) designing a scalable, research-based PD course; (2) implementing this course with two cohorts of faculty; and (3) tracking student persistence in the discipline as a means to evaluate PD efficacy. The project will make use of the National Center for Women & Information Technology's (NCWIT) considerable expertise and network, including research-based recruitment and retention practices, a 1500+ curricula repository for student engagement (EngageCSEdu), a dedicated community college advisory board, and social scientists to support the project. The study will use a mixed methods approach, which will enable triangulation and synthesized data analysis that is unavailable through a simple quantitative or qualitative study. Rubric-based assessments will provide an objective measure of the implementation of the PD for each faculty member. Assessing both pre- and post-PD will account for the different levels of engagement practices the faculty may already be implementing prior to involvement in this project. Research findings will help educators to understand differential student persistence in CS/IT and the role faculty play in the field's diversification, helping to provide more engaging learning environments for diverse students, and leading to a more diverse U.S. technical workforce.