Collaborative Research: Establishing and Propagating a Model for Evaluating the Long Term Impact of Pre-College Computing Activities

随着美国进一步进入21世纪，计算机技能变得越来越重要，因此美国迫切需要增加熟练技术工人的数量。人们意识到，维持政治和经济安全所需的技术人员数量远远超过现在或不久的将来可用的技术人员数量，这助长了这种需求。为了增加人们的兴趣，商业、政府和非营利教育团体赞助了许多旨在将计算机带给更多学生的倡议，最近以K-12为重点。该项目旨在确定这些活动的长期影响，作为在美国发展熟练技术劳动力的机制。该项目的目标是创建必要的资源和工具，以确定最佳实践，以确定这些大学预科计算活动对参与者的长期影响，包括基于性别和种族的数据分析。该项目的范围将包括两个阶段：1)识别、审查和分析过去和当前的大学前计算活动及其对参与者的影响，以确定主要影响变量；2)创建和实施收集大学前计算活动相关数据的正式流程，包括主要影响变量，这是教育研究人员能够评估和分析这些活动的长期影响所必需的。这个项目的两个重要成果是：创造了可用于衡量大学前计算机工作的长期影响的工具；以及使用这些工具评估当前和过去大学预科计算工作的效果的测量结果。

There is a critical need to increase the number of skilled technology workers within the United States, with computing skills becoming increasingly important as the nation moves further into the 21st century. This need is fueled by the realization that the number of tech workers needed to maintain political and economic security far outweighs the current workers available now or in the immediate future. To increase interest, commercial, governmental, and not-for-profit educational groups have sponsored numerous initiatives aimed to bring computing to more students, recently with a K-12 emphasis. This project seeks to determine the long-term impact of these activities as a mechanism for growing the skilled technology workforce within the United States. The goal of this project is to create the resources and tools necessary for identifying best practices for identifying the long term impact of these pre-college computing activities on participants, including analyses of data based on gender and ethnicity. The project's scope will include two phases: 1) the identification, review, and analysis of past and current pre-college computing activities and their impact on participants to determine the major influencing variables and 2) the creation and implementation of a formal process for collecting data related to pre-college computing activities, including major influencing variables, necessary for educational researchers to be able to evaluate and analyze the long-term impact of these activities. Two significant outputs from this project are the creation of instruments available for measuring the long-term effects of pre-college computing efforts; and measurement results from using these instruments to evaluate the effects of current and past pre-college computing efforts.