Ellen Zegura: And so um! We're really excited to have you here, Jamie. The um strength of numbers of your your audience is really a Testament. I'm sure both to to you and and interest in your work. And also, as I mentioned the broader interest in this topic across the foundation, so let me not
Ellen Zegura: take up any more of your time, and i'm gonna keep listening while also seeing you. If I can get a few other folks to in to the to the event. So thank you, Jamie, and please go right ahead.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Thanks, Allen. Thanks for the introduction. I'm really happy and honored to be here with everyone today, and to be able to share a little bit about the work that um, not just of my own, but this entire community that is really committed to building capacity, igniting action and fostering community for broadening participation and computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so, as I start to tell you a little bit about this work. I thought it might be nice to give some context about where I'm. Coming from, and how my own journey into computing started.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So I grew up in Oklahoma, and a very small town in a a rural setting. The town is called Liberty Mountains, Oklahoma. If you want to Google it you might have a hard time buying it. Ah! The high school that I went to was a public high school. It was very small,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and I had some excellent teachers, but the resources were pretty constrained, and so around the time I was a sophomore in high school I went to my guidance counselor, and I said, What do I do next? And she told me. Um! Well, there's this great course called Agriculture,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and you can learn about cows, and you can learn how to weld, and so I did that,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and then I asked again, What's next? And so it turned out that there was a vocational technical school. That's what we called them at the time. Now it's a career in technical education,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and it was about a forty five minute drive from my high school, and I thought I wanted to be a lawyer at the time,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): so I signed up for a paralegal course, and I would drive every morning at five, thirty in the morning forty, five minutes to go to this vocational technical school,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and it turns out that the best thing about my paralegal class is that I had a window that looked across the hallway into a class where I saw a bunch of people gathering around computers and high fibing each other and laughing and having a great time.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And So at the mid-morning break one day I worked up the nerve to ask this group of guys What are you doing in there?
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It looks way more interesting
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): than what i'm doing in my class. And it was an introductory computer science and programming course. And so I switched into that course, a digital design course, actually the next semester. And from there I decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in computer science,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and once I was at the University. I went to the University of Tulsa, and I had a really great mentor, and Dr. Rose Gamble.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um, but I was one of three women in my entire undergraduate computing degree program, not just a course and not just my year of entry, but across the entire program. So I was really grateful for finding a place where I belonged in Dr. Gamble's lab.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): She works with me as an undergraduate research student, and later I participated in the Computing Research Association drew program. So those are really formative experiences for me, and I'm very grateful for them.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): After I finished my undergraduate degree program, I went to Washington University in St. Louis to pursue a Ph. D. And again I had excellent mentors and a group of supportive graduate school friends, so that made it a lot easier to stay in computing,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and in my early career as a faculty member, I worked on pervasive computing systems, developing protocols for mobile, wireless sensor networks, hacking them up in middleware to make it easier for others to develop pervasive computing applications.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um! But over time I kept thinking what work in the field of computer science do I want to be doing? And I kept thinking about how through my journey It seemed very lucky that I had happened into computer science, And it was lucky
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): because in a lot of ways, computer science wasn't exactly sending out signals that I was invited to the computer science party.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): I'm.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We look at the field of computing, and the field of computing needs women. It needs those who identify as black hispanic Latin, a and indigenous, and as a person with disability in this system,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Although people who identify as being a member of these groups make up seventy percent of the Us. Us. Population, they are not represented in the computing education degree programs or in the workforce. So if you look at computer science degrees that are awarded
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): only twenty-three percent of Cs degree holders identify as women. Only four percent identify as black or African-american only around ten percent identify as hispanic and only around four percent identify as having a disability, according to numbers, from the two thousand and twenty two tallby report.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): these groups are not represented in computer science.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It's critical for us to address and develop solutions, to address the long-standing underrepresentation of women and minorities in computing
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): it's Ah! It's an issue of social justice to provide an equitable and inclusive foundation for all to participate in our society. And it's also an economic imperative um to develop a really creative and innovative and diverse future workforce and to prepare people to
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): be able to participate in the global economy as creators and controllers of technology.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so, when we look at this lack of representation.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It's important to note that inclusion is
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): doesn't just happen. It's done, and we have a design flaw. There's a design flaw in the system that makes up the field of computing. And so the question we all are asking as a discipline,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): How can computer science change to make that computer science party more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): when we look at the work that has been happening over a number of years by broadening participation in computing researchers and practitioners.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um! There's been quite a bit of progress. Some of the steps that need to be taken to address underrepresentation of the groups I've mentioned before have been readily apparent.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): For example, building capacity for students, and particularly students from historically excluded groups to get access to K. Twelve education experiences and computing is a natural first step. And so we can ask ourselves, Where are we with that?
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So the first thing I want to talk about is building capacity for Equitable, Cs. Education and K. Twelve.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): I'm. Going to start by telling you that you may be aware that we've had ap advanced placement computer science courses in high schools
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): through formal education for our number of years, for forty years. Actually so, the Apcsa course was first offered in one thousand nine hundred and eighty four. It was a programming focus course, and it still is. Today. It is still offered today.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Today it focuses on object-oriented programming concepts, data structures and algorithms and is currently taught in Java.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): let's take it.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We look at the participation today. Only about sixty seven thousand students across the entire United States are enrolling in a Pcsa,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and only twenty five percent. Roughly, of those students identify as women.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Only four point. Four percent of those students identify as black.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Only twelve point four percent of students identify as Hispanic.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It was like pretty similar to the numbers that we're seeing for computing education degree holders, computer science degree holders, and for those in the tech focus workforce.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So ah! There was a movement started of a few years ago. Now, um! To to make a change, and what kinds of opportunities we could offer. Ah, for K. Twelve ah computer science, education. And so lots of efforts across the country, and with a lot of support from Nsf. One,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and leadership by Jan Cooney in focusing on building capacity for equitable K Twelvecs education through a new version of advanced placement computer science that would have more equitable foundations.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so the Ap. Computer Science Principals course was formed. It was first offered in two thousand and sixteen to two thousand and seventeen.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And the key thing about this course is that it was designed by researchers and practitioners for true beginners. It was truly an entry point for any student in computer science and still is today. It focuses on the big ideas in computing, and also educate students about the skills and practices needed to to go on into computer science. And so we,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): over the years broadening participation in computing has focused on emphasizing computer science principles, implementations that have diversity, equity, inclusion at the focus.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So if we look at the difference between A. P. Csa and A. Pcs. P. Principles outcomes,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): if we look at two thousand and twenty one participation in a Pcs principals course. We have over one hundred thousand students compared to again around sixty seven,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): we see much greater participation of women in comparison, higher participation of students that identify as black, higher participation of students that identify as Hispanic. And when you look at other types of outcomes, the Apcs principles. Takers are three times more likely to Major Ncs than students with similar profiles who did not take a Pcs principles. And you see even greater impacts in those numbers,
female and Hispanic students.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So that's promising.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Seems like we have a great foundation in the Apcs principals course.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): However,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um, it's
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): terms of access and participation. Fifty, seven and a half percent of high schools offer computer science, nationwide,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and only a very small percentage of students are taking these courses. These are elective courses, and not every high school is equipped to to offer the course; and even if they do offer the course, how frequently are they able to offer the course? How many sections are they offering? What is the experience like
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): for students
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): who is being encouraged to participate in those courses, and by whom? What kind of influence? Ah! And and efforts are going into intentionally Ah! Designing an experience that will truly broaden persecution of historically Ah! Excluded groups in computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so, um!
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): What we really need
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): is a lever
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and one lever that we can use to try to amplify. The importance of this effort is to get our industry and government partners on board.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We need policy as a leper,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and in order to make policy, I hope that we're using data. Um. And the the great news is that in the Bpc community there's an emphasis on collecting and sharing data and making data-driven decisions that can inform policy.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so one of the things that i'm sharing with you here, if you didn't already know there's this great resource. That's a state of computer science Education Report. It's put together annually by the
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): code word Advocacy coalition. The Computer Science Teachers Association and the Deset Broadening participation in computing alliance. This particular guidebook
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): not only tells us about stats um by state, in terms of what is being offered in those States, but also participation and experiences. And so what you see on the right is a snapshot of the types of data that you can see by State
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um, including demographics of who's participating in outcomes.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): One other thing that i'd like to mention in order to really Garner,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that is intentional and synchronized, and has a broadening participation in computing at the center. It's really important to have state level policy advocates working in concert
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): to create a state-level plan, and that is one of the things that the esp alliance does and does really well within the broadening participation and computing community.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So we have policy as a lever.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): That's great,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): but we need to implement it,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and we need to get teachers teaching computer science.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We have a lot of students across the Us. And K. Twelve that need access to computer science, and they need to be taught by K. Twelve teachers
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that have had the opportunity to really uh uh engage in professional development that they seek out to become educated about computer Science and Cs. Pedagogy and equitable classroom practices.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so, although we can have policy, and we can make informed policy when it comes to time to implement that policy within a school district, or even within a school building.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Even when those schools and teachers and administrators are provided with recommended practices,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): it isn't a good idea to have a one-size-fits-all implementation. If we really want to address the needs of of a population at a school, we need adaptation to the local context and the local practices.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so one of the things many of you may be familiar with is there's a program at Nsf. Called the Cs for all researcher practitioner partnerships program that funds efforts to
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): really have more access to equitable computer science education for K. Twelve students.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so if you're not familiar with the term researcher practice our partnership.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It's basically a long-term, usually beneficial formalized collaboration between education researchers and practitioners who are usually capable teachers in this case
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um and Rpps are a way to try to provide more relevant research, to try to tailor um evidence-based approaches to the local context and really engaging researchers and practitioners to tackle what we call problems of practice.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um. It is a more equitable footing for researchers and teachers to work together to solve problems rather than developing solutions in isolation and expecting that they be adopted.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So this Rpp. For Cs approach has been instrumental in connecting teams. Um, who who are taking action for broadening participation and computing in their local context.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So I want to stop and share with you some of the work that I've been engaged with with my collaborator, Christine Julian, at the University of Texas, at Boston we were together on a project called Project, Move, smart or Pp.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): This project. What we're really doing is again tailoring the approach for the local context. So
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): we are working with a local school district Um, in which there is a whole whole whole community's whole health initiative that was trying to look at holistically how to improve student performance, and also how to have
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): um healthier living conditions within and across the community.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So within this community one of the things that we find is that the students in the community were far less physically acted active than
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): than the the typical recommended daily amount of exercise. And so, in talking with the teachers about or providing computer science education in their elementary school classrooms, we we heard from them
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that they did not have time to cover additional subjects in their elementary school classrooms, because they had to spend every moment aligning with the state standards that are required on
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): uh standardized exams.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so we thought to ourselves, These teachers need a tofer. They need something that integrates computer science. Ah! Learning objectives, and a core subject, learning a objective that really aligns with what they call the dirtiques standards one.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And we thought about it some more. After we talked to students who are in this community
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and their parents, and found that again physical activity was a concern, a lack of physical activity. And So in this project we're integrating computer science with physical education and core subjects and elementary schools with wearable microcontrollers.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so i'm going to tell you a little bit about that project. Um, and what what we produce together as a community of practice. So the wearable ah microcontroller that we're using is called the Bbc: micro bit, and it has a block based coding language associated with it,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): called make code. And so you see what we're doing here is, we're basically using that small, inexpensive, microbid sensor enabled piece of computing
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): to engage students in learning about the effectiveness of their physical activity by monitoring it and reflecting on data about it,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and then also learning about machine learning, concepts and data science concepts. So essentially, we are using the micro bit controller exactly like you would use
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): a a fitbit or an apple watch, or a fitness mechanism. But in this case we want the students to be able to recognize the different activities that they're performing in pe. And then reflect on the data in the classroom.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so you see that for every learning objective that we have, we're trying to align with the grade. Five teaches the Texas State standards as well as csta standards. And again, we are developing these learning objectives and the exercises and partnerships with the
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): pe teacher and with the classroom teachers.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so in this particular exercise we're using a block-based coding language. We define a custom block called find activity and that find activity is able to recognize the following different types of activities: We ask students to perform these activities while wearing the micro bit, both when wandering around the elementary in between classes, but also intentionally as part of the lesson designed by the pe teacher.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): After they come back from from class. We show them how this is implemented. Using the make code programming language. They extract the data. They look for patterns in the data,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and they go back and seeing what they've recognized from the patterns they then try to ah replicate or trick. Ah, the activity of recognition. Algorithm, We then take it one step further and show them how they can tinker around with the make code
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): blocks in order to change different thresholds for ah activity, recognition. And so they get to see how they manipulate the program to do that kind of Ah, that kind of activity recognition.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): What's not shown here? Are we? We're showing the approach that we're developing collaborative collaboratively.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): But what's not shown here is the Rpp work, and that is hard work. Um! What's happening in our Rpp is that the classroom teacher and the pe teacher are meeting with each other and talking about practices and ways that they can integrate this into sort of their
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): daily habits of running their class. We have graduate students and an education researcher that frequently are embedded at the school. Um, working with the teachers and the pe teacher. We have workshops with teachers who suggest ways to get twofers and three-firsts across for subjects so there's a lot of
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): interaction among practitioners and researchers that goes into finding an approach that really aligns with the needs of the school, the needs of the students and the needs of the teachers.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So I like to,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): you know. Say that there are lots of Rpps across the country. This is just one example, and we are making progress. We're making progress, but
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): we need more people across the Us. To be engaged in this important work. And so I would say that if you are interested in doing K. Twelve work, or you'll have an existing partnership with a K. Twelve school. Consider applying this Rpp.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Approach to increase the impact of your work and to keep equity at the center.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So the next thing i'd like to talk about I've talked a little bit about building capacity for page twelve equitable computer science education. But as a next step. We really need to have pathways into computer science degree programs for students who do have exposure and who Don't have exposure to K. Twelve Cs education opportunities. And so one way to do that is, through changing systems as a whole, as a whole department.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so this is a quote um that comes from an article by Carla Bradley, who is the Dean of inclusive computing, and the Director of the Center for inclusive computing at Northeastern University, and This quote, says: Our experience working with universities across the Us. Is that when schools actively manage the distribution of prior experience, they observe dramatic reductions and drop fail. Withdrawal rates,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and more consistent persistence rates across all intersectional identities.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): I don't know if you're in a computing department or not. But if you've ever taught an Intro class, or you've been at a faculty meeting, hearing others talk about Ah, students who came in from the Intro Program class into their own class.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): There are a lot of discussions about the distribution of prior experience. Some students come in with a lot of experience, and those students are typically
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): from more privileged school systems, and we already saw which groups are more likely to be included in K. Twelve computer science learning opportunities
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): if we are not
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): in higher Ed. Looking at managing the distribution of prior experience in a way that is equitable, and in a way that feels inclusive, and helps all students to understand that they belong. In computing we're going to continue to perpetuate this problem of a lack of representation of all groups across our programs. And so in this article.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Ah, Carla is pointing out that it's important to manage the distribution, and the center for inclusive computing actually recommends specific strategies for doing that. One of them is very similar to the strategy that was employed at Harvey Mud College,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): where students can self-select into versions of courses that are
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): ah end up covering the same required learning objectives, but one is self-selected for students with prior experience, and they may cover some advanced topics that are not required
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): at not required learning objectives in the course, and they end up at the same sort of completion point at the end of either the accelerated or
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): or a beginner version.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So that's one structural way structural challenge that we need to dress. Another challenge that we need to address is
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): um one that is really pervasive.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We need to create more inclusive experiences and Cs degree programs.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We have to address
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): the head
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): racism and bias and gender bias that our students experience. We have to create pathways where everyone gets an opportunity to build social capital and to work with faculty, to have mentors
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and to have positive experiences with their peers as well.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so if we look at Vpc. Interventions that support persistence and computing degree programs, we know from the literature that there are a lot that seem to work pretty well
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): undergraduate research experiences like I mentioned for myself. Those have been shown to be really effective for helping to retain all students, and particularly students from underrepresented and excluded groups.
Simple belonging interventions, uh
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): it can be, can be used to sort of indicate that others often may feel like they they Don't belong, that they have challenges that it's not necessarily easy for them,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): having inclusive teaching practices, of course, is an important one, mentoring and pair programming.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So what's interesting, though, is that a lot of these interventions have been around for a while.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We roughly know that we should be doing them. But we continue to learn a little bit more as we go along. So, for example,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): what we found is that for peer programming
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): it seemed like a very promising approach. But what we find is that it's actually not,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and an inclusive experience for everyone in particular. There has been some data that shows that black women experience a lot of microaggressions and bias and
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): experiences that it just are not very pleasant in peer programming interactions, more so than white women. And so pair programming, maybe not not the best
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): intervention to use universally. Um, but could be okay in particular situations. And so one of the things that I want to point out here is that we have to think about not just choosing one intervention,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): but we have to think about choosing a collection of interventions that can align with the context of the different groups that we want to include. Ah, that that need to be included in the field of computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so that's what we do in the stars, computing for alliance, for broadening participation in computing. So i'm a pi, and the director of the stars, computing core and stars, is an ecosystem that allows for flexibility. It's a collection of Bpc. Interventions as part of a system, and that allows for different approaches to be contextualized at a University. It also allows for lots of different
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): bad
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): groups of students to be addressed by the different combinations of the
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Vpc. Interventions for part of stars. So overall. What stars aims to do is to create educational experiences in computing that are more equitable and inclusive. And in order to do that, we have three three major change strategies. We try to build capacity for broadening participation and computing and college computing permits. We do that for both faculty and students who are interested in becoming change agents for broadening participation.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We want to ignite Bpc actions, so we give nudges and ways to participate in leading Bpc efforts among college faculty and students, and we want to foster Bpc. Community and commitment so that
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): everyone who is interested in doing this important work can learn together, share promising practices and work together to amplify their effective approaches.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so, just as a point of comparison, when you look again at the data about who graduates and Cs. You can see that there's a difference in our stars. Community in the Stars community. Forty-seven percent of our members are women
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): thirty nine percent identify as black and nine percent identify as Hispanic. So in many ways the Stars community looks closer to the general population than the computer science graduate population.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So we have over ten years of data for students who have participated in the collection of interventions offered by the stars computing for and when students join stars, they take a pre survey. Um starting at the beginning of their first semester, and then they take a post survey at the end of each semester, and we use the last Post survey as the final quote survey, and what we were able to do with this ten years
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): we were able to run some really interesting studies that help us to understand a little bit more about the effectiveness and the impact of the stars. And so this particular intervention again looked at
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): how different aspects and factors might impact computing persistence and persistence intentions that students attributed to stars. And so what we found is that stars does in fact, have enhanced effects on persistence, intentions of black, Hispanic and Asian students who participate in stars.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): The arrows that point from these different factors to computing persistence, and so intentions indicates that that is a statistically significant relationship and the color of the arrow, the darker the arrow, the stronger. Ah, the relationship was
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): so. You can see also that ah initial persistence Ah contributed to computing persistence, intentions. And so we always find ourselves answering a question. You know,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Don't, you think that students who participate in stars are likely the ones that are going to stay. Anyway. They joined something. They're going to be the ones who stay.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Well, we then did a study controlling for initial persistence of intentions. And this is the way we set it up. So we have a Pre- survey item and a post survey item that asked about plans to stay in the field of computing one.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We looked at the collection of students who answered on the pre-survey. I plan to leave. I am not going to stay in computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We looked at their responses after they participated in stars. We
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): for that entire group of students who disagreed at the pre-survey that they wanted to stay. These were the ones that were going to leave.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Eighty-seven percent said they wanted to stay after they participate in stars.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): A vast majority of students who are planning to leave were more committed to a career in computing after they participated in stars.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So then we were interested in using the the student survey responses to conduct some regression analyses to see which of these Vpc. Interventions that are are made possible through stars are most important for increasing intentions to persist in computing at the intersections of race and gender. And so this comparison will allow us to quantitatively demonstrate how
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): needs are different across demographic groups for these different interventions, and
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): for you know which which groups may have some commonality. So you can see here that there are distinct differences between what works, for example, between black women and white women. There are distinct differences between what works for black men and black women.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): There are distinct differences between what works between white women and black men. So you can see here that, for example, for
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): ah black men, opportunities for professional networking was really the only statistically significant predictor of intentions to persist in terms of Ah Stars interventions for black women in contrast, career, awareness and close collaboration with faculty were the most significant
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): um interventions that have a statistically significant and positive impact on computing persistence intentions. So if you want to know a little bit more about this. This paper was recently published in Acm. Tosi, and has a lot more details.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So we further did a study on Ah Bpc. Interventions. Ah! And their impact on intentions to persist. And we thought, you know, these stars interventions that we're using are really similar to some of the interventions that maybe offered
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): ah sort of on an individual basis within computing departments. So we wanted to do a comparative study of stars vpc interventions versus non-stars. Epc interventions.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So you wanted to look at. How does stars impact students intentions to persist in computing related careers compared to non-stars participants, and then compared to a match sample in similar Vpc interventions. And then we also wanted to look to see if those impacts would differ by race,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): gender, or ethnicity.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So the way that we did. This is, we analyzed Dana from a National survey administered by the Computing Research Association Center for evaluating the research pipeline. This is a data buddy survey. That is sort of a student experience of a major survey, and also measures climate, um and participation in different types of activities. So we worked with serve to
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): add stars, types of activities to their survey, and they issued it for several years now. And so what we were able to do with that data
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that is to do propensities for matching, to define a stars like comparison group of students, we use the logistical regression methods to estimate the intensity scores and use nearest neighbor Matching to find
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Ah, students who were like each other um, and who were participating in like activities. And so when we talked about students who were like each other. Ah, gender, race, age, socioeconomic factors, and participation in stars like activities. It's what we were looking for to be able to match students and say they were similar students across stars and non-stars, or stars and stars like that
to this.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So what we found here is that stars had enhanced impacts on computing career persistence even more so than students who had ah participated in stars like epc interventions, and that was most significant.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And between among students from historically excluded groups. So this chart at the bottom that you're seeing is a plot of the density distributions of the estimated propensity. Scores for the stars like participants, one hundred and fifty,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and all non-stars, participants. And then, of course, stars, participants, if you look at the one on the top, the plot on the top. Ah, that red dot is showing um the mean, and you can see that these results show that
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Um! When students are engaging in multiple but separate Ppc interventions. Those don't quite counter the effects of racist systems of oppression on students intentions to persist in computing careers as one
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): highly as they do for stars.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So the evidence shows some difference for stars, and we think that the difference can lie in the fact that stars as a holistic program was purposely created to foster a community and activities with a common mission to champion historically underrepresented and underserved um groups in computing and the Stars national network. Emission ensures that there are a diverse group of students where students are likely to find
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): affinity with those who have similar identities and values across multiple institutions. We furthermore did a series of qualitative interviews that showed that
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): our program, a lot of alumni really appreciated Star's ability to develop their skills increase their sense of longing, increase self-efficacy and self-awareness, and provided them with shared experiences
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and of applying their values, to pay it forward and to broaden participation in computing
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): so. One other thing that we looked at is I mentioned before we were studying whether or not stars had enhanced effects on persistence intentions,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): but we really wanted to also look at whether or not stars leads to actual persistence in computing, and the answer is, Yes, Ninety Two percent of stars alumni remain in the computing field. These are a few of our Sars alumni that are both pictured here. Many of them have not only gone on to careers in computing, but have gone into technical careers that involve broadening participation and computing itself
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): so. Ah, you'll see on the far left that's Kolia Braswell, Dr. Kulia Braswell who founded the In-tech summer camp program for black Middle school girls next to her as navaline Burgos, who worked at the am an Anita Borg Institute
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Ah! For women and helped to run the ah Race Hopper Conference each year in the middle is Veronica Katete, who is now a professor at Ah in C State University
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): on her right as Kamar Galloway, who, when he was a star-stated student, actually developed a curriculum for K twelve computing outreach, and that led to his position as the Google Cs first manager for the State of South Carolina, and on the far right is Kristy Boyer, who was a star student as and is now a full professor at the University of Florida, and championing Stars
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): students to continue to persist in computing, and is now the director of an Ai Institute.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So I just wanted to mention that through the stars, computing, where not only are college students engaging in activities and interventions to retain them, and computing by creating a more inclusive environment.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): They're also Um. Leading Bpc. Projects. So at each Star's Member Institution, and college students choose to lead a Vpc. Project on K. Twelve Cs. Learning
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): socially relevant research, equity focused pure mentoring or community outreach. And the key thing here is that these projects help to advance college students self efficiency, sense of longing and confidence, because this work connects computing to community and central impacts that reinforces their computing knowledge from teaching and practice, and it develops their technical, professional, and entrepreneurial skills in the delivery
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and most of the stars leadership core students choose a project that allows them to engage with K. Twelve students and offer computer science, learning activities and star students have engaged over one hundred and fifty thousand K. Twelve students providing them with learning experiences. Um, across the United States.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So stars has grown since its inception in two thousand and six. We've had a total of seventy-nine colleges and universities participate. Ah! What we focused on most recently is evaluating our longitudinal impact, and on developing additional inclusive practices and propagating them for faculty adoption.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So I just want to mention that all this work wouldn't be possible with really fantastic stars, computing or leadership team that's shown here, and their work is very much appreciated.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): So, as we're wrapping up. I just want to revisit it. Talked about equitable K. Twelve Cs education. Then we talked about equitable Ah, higher Ed. Cs education. Why not come back, because we're in this moment where we're kind of in this age of Ai, and so it's a good time to talk about
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): What a what we're missing as we're striving for Cs. For all.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): One of the things that we think is missing,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that in the ways that we're teaching students about stem and computing
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): we're not necessarily addressing the development of key non-cognitive skills that are known to underlie effective learning and those skills are called persistence, academic resilience.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Collaboration or what we within our invite Ai Institute refer to as park, and if we can focus on developing park skills,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): that development can lead to significant improvement in academic achievement, and there is evidence shown that this is especially a case from historically marginalized groups. So this is a promising approach to try to apply to stem and computer science learning in K Twelve.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): It can impact beliefs that predict future of study, of stem, including interest and sense of belonging to.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so within the invite Nsf. National Ai Institute for inclusive intelligent technologies for education. We are focused on developing Ai systems that would
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): um be able to deliver the ability to address persistence, academic resilience, and collaboration skills for learners as they're exploring stem concepts.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): We're also designing for learners teachers and classrooms. I mentioned that Rpp approach. We really want to design learning environments with teachers. That model and nurture, effective part skilled development in classrooms in a way that aligns with their practices.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): If we're developing Ai-enabled learning systems that are nudging students. But the students are using them as part of the classroom, and the teacher see no value in them. That is a missed opportunity. We really need educators to have the input into designing these systems that align with,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): uh, the context of their students and the context of their classroom.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so how are we going to get there? We're really addressing some critical grand challenges that have largely been unsolved in Ai education versus persistent learning learner modeling techniques that can track change in growth over time, and the second is multimodal sensing and modeling of the whole learner, using more than one
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): um type of uh
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): of construct. Right here we have three constructs, persistence, academic resilience, and collaboration.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so the Ai Institute is headquartered at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida, led by Dr. Kristy Boyer and Dr. Chad Lane and We're exploring large scale collaborative, Ai Ed
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): education and broadening conversation and computing research, collecting and analyzing, sharing novel data sets for Ai educational systems, building novel and robust personal owner models and designing inclusive learning environments. And this is just a small section of the N. By Ai team, a lot of fantastic people that are doing really great work,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and so on, and leave you with some final thoughts.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): I mentioned, as I was beginning my own journey in computing, and then we talked a little bit about our journey, towards justice-centered, equitable, and inclusive computing education. And we're still on that journey. We're not quite there yet we've made some progress in building capacity to get there.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And so you may be asking yourself, What can you do um to to help push us along this path as a discipline? And so I have a few tips that i'd like to share with you um in reading suggestions. So if you're looking for a great book to read, I recommend the work of Dr. Ebeny Mcgee,
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): uh black, brown, and blue bruised. How racialized dim education stifles innovation, And one of the key takeaways that I have there is that we should be aligning educational experiences with student motivations for the study of computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Another key thing that we want to do is support critical consciousness and student agency in the study of computing. If you have just a little bit of time, I really recommend reading the culturally responsive, sustaining computer science education document.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): That is a framework that was put together by Dr. Alison, Scott and others at the K Four Center, and if you have more time reculturally relevant pedagogy by Gloria Aladdin Billings.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): And then, finally, you may consider developing your own cultural confidence in computing. There's a great program called the Three C Fellows Program, where you'll really learn a lot and learn how to put it into action.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): If you're at a community college um community, college students often have unique challenges, and so I would encourage you to join our intuition. S stem research. Hub intuition stands for investigating non-tuition needs for community college stem and computing success, particularly low income, community college stem
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): and computing students face basic needs and securities at a much higher rate.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Ah, that are counterparts at Ah, for your universities. So if you're interested, please follow up with me. Research partners can receive institutional reports and get fifteen thousand dollars to support data collection activities.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): I'd also encourage you to connect to national organizations and resources. And then, finally, i'd like to encourage you to attend the Respect Conference. Respect stands for research and equitable and sustain persuasion and engineering computing. And technology.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): There are always fantastic Ah, researchers that show up and share their knowledge and and propagate what we're learning about broadening participation in computing and justice in our computing education, and so I want to thank you for giving me your time today, and I hope that you will be motivated to
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): help continue pushing us forward for broadening participation in computing.
CISE Speaker: Jamie Payton (she/her): Thank you.