Inspiring Commitment for STEM Career Paths through Extended Women's Hackathons

通过延长女性黑客马拉松激发对 STEM 职业道路的承诺

• 批准号: 1615255
• 负责人: Youwen Ouyang
• 金额: $ 120万
• 依托单位: California State University San Marcos Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-15 至 2022-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1615255&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Inspiring; Commitment; STEM; Career; Paths

The project, targeting high school Hispanic girls, will research how a coherent set of experiences supports student competency, motivation and persistence for productive participation in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT). workforce of the future. Participants will join other young women to take part in the Women's Hackathon @ CSUSM (California State University San Marcos). (A hackathon is an event that brings computer programmers and other interested people together to improve upon or build new software programs.) The participants will then participate in an after-school that focuses on computer programming, career education, team building, and the non-programming components of the software development process. The afterschool program will use a project-based learning approach that will extend the conceptual designs of project ideas proposed during the hackathon into real solutions, which will be presented by teams at a culminating public showcase. The project will reach 180 high school girls over the 3-year duration, with a majority of participants being Hispanic girls. In the context of these program activities, project research will focus on understanding the process by which skills and interest are transformed into commitment to an ICT career, particularly for Latinas. Project research findings will be widely disseminated to researchers and K-12 educators through educational research journals and education conferences. The project will disseminate its work to wider audiences through public and social media. This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by researching effective strategies for engaging Hispanic girls and other youth in ICT and STEM.The project's research goal is to study how the relationships among interest, competency, self-efficacy, identity, and values influence commitment to pursue an ICT career pathway for young women, especially Latinas. The research will address two overarching research questions:1. To what extent does the extended Hackathon program foster and sustain participants' sense of self-efficacy and identity with ICT careers, and align their perceptions of ICT workforce with their values; and 2. To what extent do self-efficacy, identity, and values build on interest and skills to increase participants' commitment to an ICT career path.The project draws from current social psychological and educational research, and integrates self-persuasion, social learning, social identity, and goal congruity theories. This literature has revealed that, in addition to interest and competency, persistence in domains such as computer science is strongly predicted by domain-specific self-efficacy, identity, and an alignment with and internalization of the values of that field or endeavor. The comprehensive design of the research plan, if successful, will significantly advance basic research about commitment processes for individuals from groups underrepresented in the ICT workforce specifically, and STEM fields more broadly. Quantifying the impact of an extended program on downstream efficacy, identity and values processes will have a significant impact on potential modifications to existing intervention programs to increase their impact on increasing and broadening participation in ICT and STEM.

该项目以高中拉美裔女孩为目标，将研究一套连贯的体验如何支持学生在信息和通信技术(ICT)中有效参与的能力、动机和毅力。未来的劳动力。参赛者将与其他年轻女性一起参加女子黑客马拉松@CSUSM(加州州立大学圣马科斯分校)。(黑客马拉松是一项将计算机程序员和其他感兴趣的人聚集在一起，改进或开发新软件程序的活动。)然后，参与者将参加一个课后活动，重点是计算机编程、职业教育、团队建设和软件开发过程中的非编程部分。课后计划将使用基于项目的学习方法，将黑客马拉松期间提出的项目想法的概念设计扩展为真正的解决方案，并由团队在最终的公开展示中展示。该项目将在为期3年的时间里惠及180名高中女孩，其中大部分参与者是西班牙裔女孩。在这些计划活动的背景下，项目研究将侧重于了解技能和兴趣转化为对信通技术职业的承诺的过程，特别是对拉丁裔。项目研究成果将通过教育研究期刊和教育会议广泛传播给研究人员和K-12教育工作者。该项目将通过公共和社交媒体向更广泛的受众传播其工作。该项目将推动学生和教师创新技术体验(ITEST)计划的努力，通过研究让西班牙裔女孩和其他青年参与ICT和STEM的有效战略，更好地了解和促进提高学生在科学、技术、工程或数学(STEM)领域追求职业生涯的动机和能力的实践。该项目的研究目标是研究兴趣、能力、自我效能、身份和价值观之间的关系如何影响年轻女性，特别是拉丁裔女性追求ICT职业道路的承诺。这项研究将解决两个主要的研究问题：1.扩展的黑客马拉松计划在多大程度上培养和维持参与者的自我效能感和对ICT职业的认同感，并使他们对ICT员工的看法与他们的价值观保持一致；2.自我效能感、认同感和价值观在多大程度上建立在兴趣和技能的基础上，以增加参与者对ICT职业道路的承诺。该项目借鉴了当前的社会心理学和教育学研究，并整合了自我说服、社会学习、社会认同和目标一致性理论。这篇文献表明，除了兴趣和能力之外，对计算机科学等领域的坚持性还受到特定领域的自我效能感、认同感以及与该领域或努力的价值观的一致性和内在化的强烈预测。研究计划的全面设计如果成功，将大大推进对信通技术劳动力队伍中任职人数不足的群体以及更广泛的STEM领域中个人承诺进程的基础研究。量化扩展计划对下游有效性、认同感和价值观进程的影响，将对现有干预计划的潜在修改产生重大影响，以增加和扩大对ICT和STEM的参与。