Goals and Purpose of the Project

The goal of this project was to examine factors that persuade or dissuade female high school students in pursuing a computer science degree. We plan to use the results from this project to plan outreach activities for area high schools.

Process Used

In addition to the three female students on the grant (Fowee, Guszkowski, Skyllingstad), the remaining two junior/senior female majors (Camarota, Moorman) also participated in the work.

We developed a survey that included questions about attitudes towards computer science and mathematics. When planning the survey, we came up with a list of questions we would like to explore using the results: 1) Are social barriers contributing to the decline of women entering computer science? 2) Are female students being encouraged in like numbers as their male counterparts? 3) How do the expectations of female students towards computer science differ from those of male students? 4) How do the self-confidence levels of female students compare to those of male students? 5) How can we encourage women to explore computer science/computers? While our final survey did not allow us to address all of these questions, they gave us a starting point for thinking about the survey. A copy of the survey can be found on our web page. There were 26 multiple choice questions and three short-answer questions.

We decided to target AP computer science and mathematics courses and chose a set of schools to contact. Each of the student researchers was responsible for distributing the material and collecting the completed surveys from a set of schools. Our final sample included 942 students at 19 schools. Three of the schools were all-female, three were all-male, and the remainder were co-ed.

Conclusions and Results

We finished surveying students later than expected so we are still in the process of analyzing the results. We did find some intriguing results in the survey that we will be exploring further:

- 50% of the female students report an average grade of A or B in computer science classes (47% haven't taken a CS course), yet only 17% are considering computer science as a college major. 73% of the male students report an average grade of A or B and 48% are considering computer science as a major.

- About 31% of the students have been explicitly encouraged to pursue math or computer science. 64% have been neither encouraged or discouraged. These numbers were the same for both genders. This fits in with another piece of data: 51% of the females and 45% of the males said that computer science had not been suggested to them as a subject in which they might be interested. If it was suggested, the suggestion tended to be from a friend or relative rather than a teacher or counselor.

- 29% of the students said that their mother knows a lot about computers as compared to 52% who said their father knows a lot about computers.

- 29% of the females are taking the surveyed math or computer science class because of personal interest. 53% of the males cited personal interest as a reason.

More complete survey results are available on our web site.

The survey results suggest to us that female students simply do not see computer science as something they would be interested in, despite evidence that they have the ability to succeed in the classes. In the short-answer portion of the survey, several students said that they were more "English/History" people than computer science people.

We have begun to develop several ideas for outreach based on these results and plan to try these out in the coming school year:

- a mother-daughter computer science club for K-6 students. This would allow mothers to be tech-savvy role models to their daughters.

- presentations that show how computer science can be used in any discipline.

- hands-on robot programming for groups of students so they can see immediate results of their problem solving.

We also are writing a paper to present to the SIGCSE conference in 2003.

Web Page
http://www.cs.xu.edu/crew2001