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

该项目以西班牙裔高中女生为对象，将研究一系列连贯的经历如何支持学生的能力、动力和毅力，从而有效地参与信息通信技术（ICT）。未来的劳动力。参与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）。（黑客马拉松是一种将计算机程序员和其他感兴趣的人聚集在一起改进或构建新软件程序的活动。）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，以及软件开发过程中的非编程部分。课外活动将采用基于项目的学习方法，将黑客马拉松期间提出的项目概念设计扩展为实际解决方案，并由团队在最终的公开展示中展示。该项目将在三年的时间内覆盖180名高中女生，其中大多数参与者是西班牙裔女孩。在这些项目活动的背景下，项目研究将侧重于了解技能和兴趣转化为对信息通信技术职业的承诺的过程，特别是对拉丁美洲人来说。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。该项目将推进“面向学生和教师的创新技术体验”（ITEST）项目的工作，通过研究吸引西班牙裔女孩和其他青年参与ICT和STEM的有效策略，更好地理解和促进提高学生在科学、技术、工程或数学（STEM）领域从事职业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信息通信技术职业道路的承诺。该研究将解决两个主要的研究问题：1。扩展的黑客马拉松项目在多大程度上培养和维持了参与者对ICT职业的自我效能感和认同感，并使他们对ICT劳动力的看法与他们的价值观保持一致？和2。自我效能感、身份认同和价值观在多大程度上建立在兴趣和技能上，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。这些文献表明，除了兴趣和能力之外，在诸如计算机科学等领域的持久性还与领域特定的自我效能、身份以及与该领域或努力的价值观的一致性和内化密切相关。研究计划的全面设计如果成功，将大大推进有关ICT劳动力中代表性不足群体的个人承诺过程的基础研究，以及更广泛的STEM领域。量化扩展计划对下游效率、身份和价值过程的影响，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ICT和STEM参与的影响。

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.