Retaining Women CS Majors Using Research-Based Initiatives

Hello again! I just attended a talk given by Maureen Biggers and Joanne McGrath Cohoon called "Retaining Women CS Majors Using Research-Based Initiatives." As I've mentioned before, I'm studying ways to keep women in computer science. At DPU, women are definitely a minority, and I would love to see our numbers rise before I graduate!

The presenters discussed five major ideas:

-routinely facilitating academic success
-promote community
-maintain interest through curriculum
-support students
-monitor outcomes

These ideas were discussed in detail, and I found them to be very intriguing. Certain ideas had never occurred to me before, and I believe many of the potential changes discussed could've impacted my first two years as an undergrad. Some of these ideas include:

-Monitoring student outcomes through certain practices, including minute papers. Minute papers involve having students take a minute at the end of class to write down what the major topic they learned about was, and what major question he or she still has about what was discussed. I believe this could be easily implemented at DPU because we have the convenience of the application DyKnow (for those who don't know, DyKnow is an instructional application developed at DePauw which is like an interactive version of Microsoft Powerpoint, in which students can anonymously submit homework problems, questions, etc to their professor).
-Promoting community through the use of groups such as ACM and WICS. This has been a major goal of mine this year by further developing our WICS group to be more of a fun support system for female majors.
-Maintaining interest through student curriculum by breaking the stereotype of the "code monkey." Some students who take CS1 think that their only career path will lead them to a cubicle where they will spend hours away digging through intensive code. There are so many opportunities out there with CS, and I think it's really important to make that clear to all students.

This was a very helpful and informative session, and I think a lot of the ideas that were given to us could be applicable to many institutions, regardless of size. If you would like more information about this, I took pretty extensive notes, so leave a comment and I will be glad to provide those! :)

In the ties of computing, :)

Brit McCullar
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum. You can find me at britghc2007.blogspot.com.