Catherine Lang

Sequential attrition of secondary school student interest in IT courses and careers

Purpose – This paper aims to present results of interviews with Australian students in junior, middle and senior secondary‐school. It also aims to provide a current insight into the declining diversity of the information technology (IT) student cohort that is not captured in the existing literature. Educational psychology theories of self‐efficacy shed light on the development of like and dislike towards aspects of IT, it also seeks to consider the career choice decision‐making theories and models to understand the cost‐benefit dimensions of career choice in young people in the twenty‐first century. Socio‐cultural factors that condition young women for their expected role in society also apply to career choice and build a theoretical framework for the research.Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative research methodology of semi‐structured focus group interviews were conducted with students of both genders from three different year levels. The interviews were analysed using a meta matrix approach aligned...

Evaluation framework underpinning the digital divas programme

In Australia, as elsewhere, womens participation rates in Information Technology (IT) have been low. IT is the generic term used to refer to the many courses in the Computer Science, and Information Systems disciplines. While there have been a number of intervention programmes implemented aimed at encouraging women into IT and retaining them once there, few have included evaluations of the efficacy of the intervention. Thus little is known about the factors contributing to the success, or lack of success, of the interventions, or of the medium and longer term impacts for the participants. In this paper we briefly describe an intervention programme implemented with girls in the high school years. We present an evaluation framework providing a detailed overview of the aims and processes involved in the evaluation of the programme. Data for the evaluation were embedded within the data gathering methods associated with the research on the intervention itself.

Twenty-first Century Australian Women and IT: Exercising the power of choice

This paper investigates the Australian literature relating to female under-representation in the information technology (IT) sphere of careers and education. This summary of the current body of literature presented through the lens of the nature of the discipline includes emerging theories that explore the masculinization of the discipline, followed by a discussion of the lack of a sustainable impact on declining female student numbers of earlier Australian intervention programmes. A position is presented on the marginalization of this line of research within the IT discipline, as well as media representations of gendered messages about IT. Finally, student career choice literature is used to explore the authors premise that many young women in 21st century Australia, when faced with an array of career choices, appear to be exercising this power of choice to exclude IT from their list of possible futures.

Seven factors that influence ICT student achievement

In the process of establishing an audit of student achievement by gender as part of a Women in IT project, seven factors were identified that affect student success. These seven factors had minimal effect when they occurred in isolation within a unit of study, but certain combinations of factors created a learning environment that was detrimental to all students, and in other instances a learning environment that was particularly unfavourable for female students. The impact of these findings has resulted in a set of recommendations to improve the teaching of IT in universities in general.

Happenstance and Compromise: A Gendered Analysis of Students' Computing Degree Course Selection

The number of students choosing to study computing at university continues to decline this century, with an even sharper decline in female students. This article presents the results of a series of interviews with university students studying computing courses in Australia that uncovered the influence of happenstance and compromise on course choice. This investigation provides an insight into the contributing factors into the continued downturn of student diversity in computing bachelor degree courses. Many females interviewed made decisions based on happenstance, many males interviewed had chosen computing as a compromise course, and family helped in the decision-making to a large degree in both genders. The major implication from this investigation is the finding that students of both genders appear to be socialised away from this discipline, which is perceived as a support or insurance skill, not a career in itself, in all but the most technical-oriented (usually male) student.

Outreach Programmes to Attract Girls into Computing: How the Best Laid Plans Can Sometimes Fail.

This article presents a reflective analysis of an outreach programme called the Digital Divas Club. This curriculum-based programme was delivered in Australian schools with the aim of stimulating junior and middle school girls’ interest in computing courses and careers. We believed that we had developed a strong intervention programme based on previous literature and our collective knowledge and experiences. While it was coordinated by university academics, the programme content was jointly created and modified by practicing school teachers. After four years, when the final data were compiled, it showed that our programme produced significant change to student confidence in computing, but the ability to influence a desire to pursue a career path in computing did not fully eventuate. To gain a deeper insight in to why this may be the case, data collected from two of the schools are interrogated in more detail as described in this article. These schools were at the end of the expected programme outcomes. We found that despite designing a programme that delivered a multi-layered positive computing experience, factors beyond our control such as school culture and teacher technical self-efficacy help account for the unanticipated results. Despite our best laid plans, the expectations that this semester long programme would influence students’ longer term career outcomes may have been aspirational at best.

Gender and Stereotypes in Motivation to Study Computer Programming for Careers in Multimedia

A multimedia university programme with relatively equal numbers of male and female students in elective programming subjects provided a rare opportunity to investigate female motivation to study and pursue computer programming in a career. The MSLQ was used to survey 85 participants. In common with research into deterrence of females from STEM domains, females displayed significantly lower self-efficacy and expectancy for success. In contrast to research into deterrence of females from STEM domains, both genders placed similar high values on computer programming and shared high extrinsic and intrinsic goal orientation. The authors propose that the stereotype associated with a creative multimedia career could attract female participation in computer programming whereas the stereotype associated with computer science could be a deterrent.

An embedded professional paired placement model: “I know I am not an expert, but I am at a point now where I could step into the classroom and be responsible for the learning”

We present a sustainable and innovative model for pre-service teacher paired professional placements called the Teaching School model. The Teaching School model was piloted initially in partnership with a Metropolitan University and a P-12 College located in Melbourne’s northern suburbs in 2013. It was expanded in 2014 to capitalise on an existing university school partnership at a regional campus of the university. We present evidence of success through the voices of pre-service teachers, mentor teachers and school principals to demonstrate the success of professional experience model. The findings clearly show the benefit of this model of professional experience for producing work-ready graduates and for creating authentic learning and teaching environments that, according to the school principals and mentor teachers, contribute to school improvement. Our research demonstrates that this Teaching School model builds relationships and creates a community of learning and teaching educators; however, its adoption is not without challenges and limitations.

Outreach programs to promote computer science and ict to high school and middle school students

Catherine Lang Swinburne University of Technology Information and Communication Technologies Australia +61 3 9214 5884 clang@swin.edu.au Reyyan Ayfer Bilkent University Ankara, Turkey +90 312 290 5065 ayfer@bilkent.edu.tr Annemieke Craig Deakin University School of Information Systems Deakin University, Australia +61 3 5227 2152 acraig@deakin.edu.au Jane Chu Prey Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Research Redmond, WA +11392145884 jprey@microsoft.com

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PARTNERSHIPS IN THE COMMUNITY: Digital Divas and Doing IT Better

Working with community partners on research projects where the community members are part of the research team presents its own challenges. The challenges include the possible mismatch of expectations between academic team members and community members, as well as in defining the different roles people play, and managing the process. This paper reports the experiences and insights gained from working with community members involved in two research projects. The two projects were the Digital Divas project, involving the creation of a girls’ only information technology (IT) elective which has been implemented in a number of schools, and the Doing IT Better project that involved building IT capacity in the Victorian community service sector. Two community members from each of the projects are collaborators in this paper and provide the community perspective on this kind of research. Issues around concordances and discordances of academic research processes with a communitys own ways of knowing, creating, managing and disseminating knowledge and information are discussed. The roles of community expertise, along with expectations regarding relationships and interactions are also explored.