Overview

NSF grant #1920670 focused on understanding the gendered pathways in computing degrees from Florida's two-year institutions. The project, titled "Gendered Pathways: From Florida’s Two-Year Institutions to Computing Degrees," aims to investigate how gender influences educational trajectories in the field of computing. This research involves analyzing large-scale federal and state longitudinal data to identify factors that contribute to the success and persistence of women and girls in the changing landscape of U.S. postsecondary education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (STEM), with a particular focus on community college pathways to computing, a field which has been among the most sex-segregated and while also growing in enrollments and workforce demand.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT

Contributions to knowledge:

This ECR Broadening Participation in STEM study investigates women’s participation in computing fields, with a focus on community college starters. Social disparities in undergraduate field of study are a principal driver of income inequality; this has consequences for families, societies, and individuals. This project is grounded in a social justice approach to investigating and facilitating broader participation, particularly among students with compounding inequalities. This focus is consistent with the priorities of NSF INCLUDES, one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas, to develop networks and partnerships to address STEM inclusion. We employed a series of quantitative approaches including structural equation modeling, multinomial logistic regression, propensity score matching, and other techniques to investigate high school and early college academic and background factors’ effects on postsecondary major, upward transfer, and degree attainment among other related outcomes.

We are continuing to publish research in a range of scholarly and broad reach outlets. The state administrative data involved the greatest new cleaning, testing, and preparation as compared to national datasets already available to the team, therefore these findings are the newest to be released and are continuing to be pursued beyond the funding period. Most centrally, we have found the following themes in our work, with attention here to research using Florida EDW data following community college starters (beginning 2013-2016):

1.     Advanced HS and CC Gateway courses: Domain-specific effects and targeted access– community college students do enroll in AP math and science courses, and computing courses, but numbers were small during our observation window– computing for all interventions after most of our students had finished high school (across national and state datasets).

2.     It is important to offer computing and advanced STEM courses in high school and inclusively, not just to students viewed as likely to enter four-year colleges after H.S.--with the structure of developmental math, rigorous courses build upon momentum that then moves students into next step in community colleges.

3.     Gender inequities remain: we see this across datasets and have observed interesting nuance when attending to intersectional identities, especially looking at gender and race and increasingly paying attention to social class and other contextual factors. Gender disparities in computing seem to be wider in community colleges than in four-year colleges, for reasons we can hypothesize (age, geography, career-focused enrollment programs, curricular offerings) but have not been able to conclusively observe with these data.

BROADER IMPACTS

What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?

Over the course of these funding years, even with COVID-19, the project has provided multiple opportunities for training and professional development for team members. Various student and professional awards and recognitions include competitive fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships and full-time research posts, and promotions, in addition to the Ph.D. graduation of seven Ph.D. students supported financially by this grant over the funding period, and the professional training of two post-doctoral fellows now in their next research intensive placements, continuing this line of work: Nhien is at UCLA and Erichsen at University of Maryland.

Research Team (*PhD completed; ^postdoc supported, #promoted to full)

#Lara Perez-Felkner (PI), Shouping Hu (co-PI), *Jinjushang Chen, *Ciera Fluker, *^Kristen Erichsen, *Yang Li, ^Chantra Nhien, *Ladanya Ramirez Surmeier, *Chelsea Shore, *Teng Zhao

Dissemination

As noted above and detailed below, we presented our work at a series of higher education, education research, community college, STEM education, and sociology conferences. We also submitted and published our work to journals in these and related fields. We also met with a series of practitioners and stakeholders over the course of our grant, at a range of formal and informal convenings focused on researchers, practitioners, industry, and policy engaged audiences in Florida and beyond, including state (e.g., Florida College Access Network), national (e.g., Council on the Study of Community Colleges, American Educational Research Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education) and international convenings (Network Gender + STEM, University of Valencia policy pub talk). We have to date published a policy brief and done two podcast interviews, and have engaged in additional press and social media dissemination of our work, and are planning another policy brief synthesizing our most recent slate of published articles.

Last Modified: 10/30/2024
Modified by: Lara C Perez-Felkner