This project, led by Drs. Linda Sax and Kathleen Lehman at UCLA Momentum, entailed the development of a literature matrix resource that allows practitioners, researchers, non-profits, industry, and others interested in broadening participation in computing (BPC) to identify and assess relevant literature to inform their work. The literature matrix serves as a repository of 182 recently published (January 2005 - August 2020) scholarly articles that advance the empirical and theoretical knowledge around broadening participation in undergraduate computing in the United States. The articles in this matrix approach broadening participation in computing (BPC) from a variety of epistemological and methodological orientations as well as with different goals and objectives, including but not limited to implementing and evaluating BPC interventions and theorizing around broader social forces that relate to longstanding inequalities in computing.

This project occurred in two phases. In the first phase of the project, our team collaborated with experts in data science, computer science, computing education research, and library science to develop this tool. These collaborations served as the foundation for a comprehensive search, collection, and review process that ensured the articles included in the literature matrix tool are the most relevant to the mission of the overall project. During the second phase of the project, our team completed the screening process for the literature matrix and developed the final matrix. This included initiating a literature search based on our previously determined parameters, which yielded over 3,700 relevant articles. Then, our team screened results to identify the articles to be included in the final literature matrix (n=182 articles). After our team's initial screening, a natural language processing (NLP) tool designed for this project extracted key data (bibliographic data, sample description, institutional context) from each piece of literature, which was indexed in the final matrix. Finally, our team delivered the matrix to the Computing Research Association (CRA). CRA is working to integrate the matrix into the resource website BPCnet.org to make the matrix publicly available. Our team also drafted a technical report outlining the methods used in the literature search which will be publicly available alongside the completed matrix.

The literature matrix began as a tool for our research team's internal research purposes, but with the support of NSF, our team has operationalized it in such a way that it can serve the larger BPC community. As such, the broader impacts of our work were the primary impetus for this project.  By making the scholarship on broadening participation efforts accessible to a wider audience, practitioners, such as PIs developing BPC plans to comply with the NSF CISE requirements, will be better positioned to develop initiatives grounded in research. In turn, this will increase the likelihood that funded initiatives will work--that is, they will help to diversify computing fields. Creating this resource also strengthened preexisting collaborations between the Momentum research team and other groups working to support BPC efforts, such as NCWIT and CRA. The gender and racial/ethnic gaps in computing have proven to be stubborn; it will take a synergistic effort across many groups of people to diversify computing fields. The literature matrix project is a supporting component of that larger effort.  

Last Modified: 01/24/2022
Modified by: Kathleen J Lehman