Visit from Farnam Jahanian, AD for CISE at NSF

Farnam Jahanian visited Georgia Tech last month.  Farnam is the Assistant Director at the US National Science Foundation, in charge of all computing related funding (CISE Division).  He spoke to issues about computing education funding, and I got to ask some of my questions, too.

He said that the Office of Management and Budget has really been driving the effort to consolidate STEM education funding programs.  OMB was unhappy that Biology, Engineering, and CISE all had their own STEM education programs.  However, CISE got to keep their education research program (as the new STEM-C program) because it was already a collaboration with the education division in NSF (EHR).  All the rest (including TUES) is being collapsed into the new EHR programs.

In his talk, he made an explicit argument which I’ve heard Jan Cuny make, but hadn’t heard an NSF AD make previously:

1. We have a dramatic underproduction of computing degrees, around 40K per year.
2. We have a dramatic under-representation of certain demographic groups (e.g., women, African-Americans, Hispanics), and we can’t solve #1 without solving that under-representation.  He says that the basic arithmetic won’t work.  We can’t get enough graduates unless we broaden participation in computing.
3. We have a lack of presence in primary and secondary school in the United States (K-12).  He claims that we can’t solve #2 without fixing #3.  We have to have a presence so that women and under-represented minority groups will discover computing and pursue degrees (and careers) in it.

Gender Bias Found in How Graduate Students Review Scientific Studies

We’ve heard stories like this before, about the implicit bias in how STEM professionals are judged.  This one is striking because the participants are graduate students, not established researchers who reflect years of experience in the community.  These are the new researchers, and they’re already biased.

The research found that graduate students in communication — both men and women — showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names like “Brenda Collins” or “Melissa Jordan.”

These students gave higher ratings to the exact same abstracts when the authors were identified with male names like “Andrew Stone” or “Matthew Webb.”

In addition, the results suggested that some research topics were seen as more appropriate for women scholars — such as parenting and body image — while others, like politics, were viewed as more appropriate for men.

These findings suggest that women may still have a more difficult time than men succeeding in academic science, said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” Knobloch-Westerwick said.

via Gender Bias Found in How Scholars Review Scientific Studies.

Diversity programs give illusion of corporate fairness: Costs of just a little education

Reminds me of the Jump$start program that made students over-confident and worse at making financial decisions.  Teach people a little about diversity, and they think it doesn’t exist anymore.

Diversity training programs lead people to believe that work environments are fair even when given evidence of hiring, promotion or salary inequities, according to new findings by psychologists at the University of Washington and other universities.

The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs.

via Diversity programs give illusion of corporate fairness, study shows | UW Today.

Requiring Computing Education: An Impractical Path to Computing Literacy

My thinking on computing education has been significantly influenced by a podcast about hand-washing and financial illiteracy. I suspect that education is an ineffective strategy for achieving the goal of Computing Literacy for Everyone. I have a greater appreciation for work like Alan Kay’s on STEPS, Andy Ko’s work on tools for end-user programming, and the work on Racket.

On Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy

I have been listening to Freakonomics podcasts on long drives. Last month, I listened to “What do hand-washing and financial illiteracy have in common?” I listened to it again over the next few days, and started digging into the literature they cited.

At hospitals, hand-washing is far less common than our knowledge of germ theory says it ought to be. What’s most surprising is that doctors, the ones with the most education in the hospital, are the least likely to wash their hands often enough. The podcast describes how one hospital was able to improve their hand-washing rates through other behavioral methods, like shaming those who didn’t wash their hands and providing evidence that their hands were likely to be filled with bacteria. More education doesn’t necessarily lead to behavioral change.

Much more important was the segment on financial illiteracy. First, they present the work of Annamuria Lusardia who has directly measured the amazing financial illiteracy in our country. There is evidence that much of the Great Recession was caused by poor financial decisions by individuals. Less than a third of the over-50-year-old Americans that Lusardia studied could correctly answer the question, “If you put $100 in a savings account with 2% annual interest, at the end of five years you will have (a) less than $102, (b) exactly $102, or (c) more than $102?” More mathematics background did lead to more success on her questions, but she calls for a much more concerted effort in financial education. Her arguments are supported by some pretty influential officials, like Fed Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill. It makes sense: If people lack knowledge, we should teach them.

Lauren Willis strongly disagrees, and she’s got the data to back up her argument. She has a 2008 paper with the shocking title, Against Financial Literacy Education that I highly recommend. She presents evidence that financial literacy education has not worked — not that it couldn’t work, but it isn’t working. She cited several studies that showed negative effects of financial education. For example, high school students who participated in the Jump$start program become much more confident about their ability to make financial decisions, and yet made worse decisions than those students who did not participate in the program.

The problem is that financial decisions are just too complicated, and education (especially universal education) is expensive to do well (though Willis doesn’t offer an estimated cost). Educational curricula (even if tested successful) is not always implemented well. The gap between education in teen years and making decisions in your 40′s and 50′s is huge. Instead of education, we should try to prevent damage from ignorance. Willis suggests that we should create a cadre professional of financial advisors and make them available to everyone (for some “pro bono”), and that we should increase regulation of financial markets so that there are fewer riskier investments for the general public. It costs the entire society enormously when large numbers of people make poor financial decisions, and it’s even more expensive to provide enough education to prevent the cost of all that ignorance.

This was a radical idea for me. Education is not free, and sometimes it’s cheaper to prevent the damage of ignorance than correcting the ignorance.

Implications for Computing Literacy Education

I share the vision of Andy DiSessa and others of computing as a kind of literacy, and a goal of “Computing for All” where everyone has the knowledge and facility to build programs (for modeling, simulations, data analyses, etc.) for their needs. Let’s call that a goal of “Universal Computing Literacy,” and we can consider the costs of using education to reach that goal, e.g., “Universal Computing Education to achieve Universal Computing Literacy.”

The challenge of computing literacy may be even greater than the challenge of financial literacy. People know even less about computing than they do about finance. We don’t know the costs of that ignorance, but we do know that it has been difficult and expensive to provide enough education to correct that ignorance.

Computing may be even more complicated than finance. Willis talks about the myriad terms that people need to know to make good financial decisions (like “adjustable rate mortgages”), but they are at least compounds of English words! I attended a student talk this week, where terms like “D3” and “GreaseMonkey” were bandied about like they were common knowledge. We invent so much language all the time.

What could we possibly teach today in high school that will be useful in even five or ten years, when those students are in their careers, to be able to build something that they could use? “We’ll teach conceptual knowledge so that they can pick up any tools or languages they need.” We have no idea how to achieve this goal in computer science. It takes an enormous effort to develop transferable knowledge, and progress in computing changes the target task all the time. I have a PhD in Computer Science, and it takes me way too much effort to pick up JavaScript libraries that I might want to use — far more effort than a non-technical person will be willing to put in.

The problem is that education is often inefficient and ineffective. Jeremy Roschelle pointed out that education improvements rarely impact economic outputs. Greg Wilson shared a great paper with me in response to some tweets I sent about these ideas. Americans have always turned to education to solve a wide variety of ills, but surprisingly, without much evidence of efficacy. We can teach kids all about healthy eating, but we still have a lot of obesity. Smokers often know lots of details about how bad smoking is for them. Education does not guarantee a change of behavior. This doesn’t mean that education could not be made more effective and more efficient. But it might be even more expensive to fix education than to deal with ignorance.

Universal education is always going to be expensive, and some things are worth it. Text illiteracy and innumeracy are very expensive for our society. We need to address those, and we’re not doing a great job at that yet. Computing education to achieve real literacy is just not as important.

I am no longer convinced that providing computing education to everyone is going to be effective to reach the goal of making everyone computing literate, and I am quite convinced that it will be very expensive. Requiring computing education for STEM professionals at undergraduate level may still be cost-effective, because those are the professionals most likely to see the value of computing in their careers, which reduces the costs and makes the education more likely to be effective.

Barb sees a benefit in Universal Computing Education, but not to achieve Universal Computing Literacy. We need to make computing education available everywhere for broadening participation in computing. To get computing into every school, Barb argues that we have to make it required for everyone. Without the requirement, schools won’t go to the effort of including it. Without a requirement, female and URM students who might not see themselves in computing, would never even give it a chance. In response to my argument about cost, she argues that the computing education for everyone doesn’t have to be effective. We don’t have to achieve lifelong literacy for everyone. Merely, it has to give everyone exposure, to give everyone the opportunity to discover a love for computing. Those that find that love will educate themselves and/or will pursue more educational opportunities later. I heard Mike Eisenberg give a talk once many years ago, where he said something that still sticks with me: that the point of school is to give everyone the opportunity to find out what they’re passionate about. For that reason, we have to give everyone the chance to discover computing, and requiring it may be the only way to reach that goal.

It’s always possible that we’ll figure out to educate more effectively at lower cost. For example, integrating computing literacy education into mathematics and science classes may be cheaper — students will be using it in context, teachers in STEM are better prepared to learn and teach computing, and we may improve mathematics and science teaching along the way. My argument about being too expensive is based on what we know now how to do. Economic arguments are often changed by improved science (see Malthus).

As Willis suggests for financial literacy, we in computing literacy are probably going to be more successful for less cost by focusing on the demand side of the equation. We need to make computing easier, and make tools and languages that are more accessible, as Alan Kay, Andy Ko, and the Racket folks are doing. We have to figure out how to change computing so that it’s possible to learn and use it over an entire career, without a PhD in Computer Science. We have to figure out how to get these tools into use so that students see use of such tools as authentic and not a “toy.”

“Computing for All” is an important goal. “Access to Computing Education for All” is critical. “Universal Computing Education to achieve Universal Computing Literacy” is likely to be ineffective and will be very expensive. On the other hand, requiring computing education may be the only way to broaden participation in computing.

Where to find Guzdial at SIGCSE Symposium 2013

I’ve already written a couple of SIGCSE Symposium 2013 preview posts (on the Dorn and Elliott Tew paper, and on the UCSD set of papers on Peer Instruction).  Here in my last preview post, I’ll give you a sense for what I’ll be up to.  I fly out to Denver Tuesday 5 March in the evening.

• Wednesday (6 March 2013), I’ll be at the SIGCSE Board Meeting all day.  If I figured it right, this is my last face-to-face Board meeting — I’ve decided not to run again and I think that the new Board starts this Fall.
• Thursday, I have no presentations, but I have the day pretty much booked meeting with people who are also going to be at SIGCSE. Should be fun!
• Friday is over-booked.
  • At 10:45 in Governors 12, Betsy DiSalvo is presenting her paper on Glitch (that I’m a co-author on), “Workifying Games.”
  • We’re having an ECEP lunch for advisors and Experts Bureau members at noon. (I didn’t realize until this weekend that there’s a plenary on Friday at lunchtime — that’s never happened before that I can recall at the SIGCSE Symposium.)
  • At 1:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the “Passion, Beauty, Joy, and Awe” panel — I’ve decided to try to do a live coding with sound demo, which should be exciting and (maybe) fun and (maybe) disastrous.
  • At 3:45 in Ballroom E, I’m on the Panel on MOOCs, “The Revolution will Be Televised: Perspectives on Massive Open Online Education,” with both proponents and critics. (Guess which role I’ll be playing.)
  • I’m having a dinner with student volunteers at 5 pm, then hoping to find Michael Köllig to congratulate him on his Outstanding Contribution to CS Education award.
• Saturday is literally double-booked.
  • At 9 am, I’m presenting in the “Nifty Assignments” special session in Ballroom E, AND I’m a discussant in Ballroom F on the “Expanding access to K-12 Computer Science Education: Research on the Landscape of CS Professional Development.”  I’m thrilled to be on “Nifty” for the first time, but which I could stay for both.  I think I’m going to speak first at “Nifty,” then run next door to be on the “Landscape” panel.
  • At 3 pm, we start the ACM Education Council meeting (after Jane Margolis’s lunchtime plenary talk).
• Sunday, I’ll be at the ACM Education Council meeting all day, then fly home at 5, getting home at 10 pm. Monday is our PhD recruiting day and teaching, so not much recovery and decompression time.

(If I miss some days of the blog in here, I hope you’ll understand.)

Research questions on MOOCs: Who’s talking, who’s completing, and where’s the teaching?

In the last three weeks, I was asked several times at MIT and Stanford about what questions I would like answered about MOOCs.  I didn’t get any answers, but folks at Georgia Tech were asking me about the questions, so I thought I’d share some of them here.  This is the evidence I’m looking for.

What’s the value of the discussion forum in a MOOC?  What percentage of students participate in the discussion forum?  What’s the correlation between participation in the forum and completing? I’ve heard people say that that’s where the “teaching” and learning takes place, but I would like evidence of that. I’ve mentioned here that I used to work in computer-supported collaborative learning in the early 2000′s, and some of our work showed that students posted about 1 note every two weeks most on-line forums (even when students were measurably learning). That’s not really enough posting for a dialog and collaborative learning. Is it the same for MOOCs?  We also found that students were LESS likely to participate in on-line collaborative learning forums when the subject was Engineering or CS.  Is that true for MOOCs as well?

What are the demographics of completers in a MOOC?  We already have a problem of CS being mostly White/Asian and Male.  (Lots of reasons why that is a problem: From equity and fairness, to tapping into the fastest growing demographics vs the fastest shrinking demographics, to involving more diversity in design decisions.)  I suspect that MOOCs are even more Male than face-to-face classes (based on the factors that we know lead to broadening participation in computing).   If I’m right, then investing more in MOOCs is counter to our community’s goals to broaden and diversify computing.

Is there any teaching going on?  Overall, I’d really like to know more about the characteristics of people who complete MOOCs, e.g., how many are working full-time when taking the MOOC, how many hours a week are spent on homework in order to complete, what is the background of completers in terms of other degrees?  Right now, MOOCs are just for autodidacts.  Do we want Computer Science to only be for autodidacts?  Don’t we believe that teaching allows people to succeed who might not succeed on their own?  (Isn’t that the definition of scaffolding?)  Are MOOCs really teaching, or are they filtering out the people who couldn’t learn on their own?  If we want MOOCs to be for more than just those who don’t really need the teacher anyway, then we need to measure who is going in, what they know already, and what they learn at the end (and if they “come out,” i.e., complete).

“Florida is killing Computer Science”

“Florida is killing Computer Science,” was the first thing that Joanne Barrett told us when we asked her how things were going in Florida. Barbara and I went to Orlando to give the Technology track keynote (joint! It was fun!) and two breakouts at the FCIS Conference on Thursday. Joanne ran the Technology track at FCIS. (Our travel was sponsored by CSTA and Google – thanks!) The mood of the CS teachers we met was dismal.

Currently, computer science is part of the academic high school degree in Florida — the classes that one would take as College preparation. It’s mostly taught by mathematics teachers. This year is the end of that. This is the last year that the current CS classes will be offered.

As of next year, all the computer science classes in Florida will be moved into business, as part of career preparation. As we understand it from Joanne, they literally won’t count for credit towards an academic high school degree. The AP CS will stay in the academic track, but all the other computer science courses will move to business.

Why? Exactly the same issue as in Georgia: Perkins funding will pay for hardware, so career prep has the computers, and it gets computer science. We spoke to one business teacher who is desperately seeking professional development to prepare herself for teaching all these new computing courses. We met one of the teachers at the Florida Virtual High School (which has a really cool CS sequence, and an astounding success rate for their students on AP CS), and she said that they may not even be able to offer any CS next year. FVHS is about academic subjects, and CS is being re-classified. Florida is also looking for industry certification for the end of the Perkins-funded pathway, and the teachers we talked to said that they’re currently considering an IEEE Certification — which is explicitly for graduates of four year degree programs, not high school students.

What will this do to CS education in Florida? it won’t be “killed,” but it will be changed. I worry about the quality, when swapping out all the experienced math teachers for inexperienced business teachers. I can’t the impact on CS10K goals.

Can AP CS succeed (in particular, the new CS:Principles effort) as a standalone AP, with all the other CS courses in another track? Maybe. I wonder how much effort school districts will put into AP CS, if they have a different, funded CS pathway. I also wonder if CS:Principles can meet its goal of helping to broaden participation in this context — the career prep programs that I’ve seen are far more heavily under-represented minority than the college prep programs. What if the minority students you want to draw into computing via AP CS are off taking the career prep classes?

Who takes a MOOC (geographically)?

Bravo to Dr. Chuck Severance for sharing the maps he created of where his MOOC students are coming from! These are fascinating data, and the result is particularly useful since there’s so little data to be had on MOOCs. It’s hard to be sure from just eye-balling the data, but my sense is:

• This is mostly a developed-world phenomenon.
• A small percentage of attendees come from Africa.

I would really love to know gender and ethnicity/race demographics on who is taking and who is completing MOOCs. Here’s a prediction for the technology-heavy Udacity courses: 80% White or Asian, 90% male. Anybody know where we can get the data to test this hypothesis?

As part of my Internet History, Technology, and Security course on Coursera I did a demographics survey and received 4701 responses from my students.

I will publish all the data in a recorded lecture summarizing the class, but I wanted to give a sneak preview of some of the geographic data results because the Python code to retrieve the data was fun to build. Click on each image to play with a zoomable map of the visualized data in a new window. At the end of the post, I describe how the data was gathered, processed and visualized.

via Dr. Chuck’s Blog » Blog Archive » Visualizing the Geographic Distribution of my Coursera Course.

Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America? | Techland | TIME.com

Nice piece in Time on the lack of computing education in the United States.  In particular, I like that Jane Margolis takes on the myth that students will just learn it on their own without support.  That’s thinking that prevents broadening participation in computing

Not every kid has those advantages.

“There is this assumption that if you have this innate talent and you’re drawn to it, you’ll learn it on your own and you don’t really need it at school,” says Jane Margolis, senior researcher at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. “Kids that have a lot of resources at home, often with parents with a lot of technical know-how and access to software, people look at them and say ‘Oh, they just take to it.’”

In 2010, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the percentage of computer workers in Silicon Valley that were black or Latino stood at 1.5% and 4.7%, respectively. Girls Who Code, an organization that encourages teen girls to pursue opportunities in technology, points out that only 14% of undergraduate computer science degrees are earned by women.

via Can We Fix Computer Science Education in America? | Techland | TIME.com.

An essay is enough to narrow gender-based achievement gap

I love the reasoning behind this study.  We know that gender gaps in achievement (and enrollment?) are entirely cultural.  So the solution is cultural, and has nothing to do with the topic.  Here, an essay in Physics class narrowed the gender gap.  Could something like this work in CS, too?  (Thanks to Fred Martin for sending this to me!)

A study in last week’s Science describes a program at the University of Colorado, focused on helping to narrow the achievement gap in an introduction to physics class targeted to science majors. In past years, research had found that a strong background and preparation could account for over half the gender difference in test scores, but that still leaves other, substantial factors to explain the discrepancies.

The authors suspected that stereotypes might account for the remaining differences. “The fear of being devalued based on a group identity, such as becoming aware that one could be seen in light of a negative stereotype about one’s group, has been shown to undermine performance on difficult tests,” they explain. “For example, women’s performance on difficult math and science tests can suffer insofar as they worry that their poor performance could be seen to confirm a negative gender stereotype.”

Since the problem wasn’t physics-based, the solution wasn’t either.

via Self-affirming essay boosts coeds’ physics skills.

The role of single-sex schools for black and Latino men

I found this an interesting synchronicity with my blog post last week about women in Qatar and how they prefer gender-segregated schools, even as they embrace “geekiness.”  This new report highlights the value of single-sex schools in changing black and Latino men’s sense of identity.  How do you change culture?  Maybe what we’re seeing in Qatar and in this report is that you change culture for some students by first separating them from the culture that enforces the original views?  Not a new idea — Rousseau made that claim in 1762.  Maybe he was right?

Racially, a key administrator highlights how “students are bombarded with imagery and the identity of being a thug, being a gangster, being hard,” defining what qualifies one as a man. This socially constructed disconnect between what it means to be a man and what it means to be a learner presents a real challenge for the schools’ young men.

There is a fear of breaking certain stereotypes, with poverty and home/family life posing significant challenges. By providing students with a secure sense of self and an academic identity transcending a street identity, single-sex schools argue that they are able to remedy the stigma associated with becoming an educated Black or Latino male.

via Theories of Change among Single-Sex Schools – Announcements – NYU Steinhardt.

Relevance Matters: Science needs a woman’s touch

Invention Magazine is not where I look for deep insight into science and computing education, but the piece earlier this month on “Science needs a woman’s touch” is really interesting.  In particular, this anecdote about what female students are looking for relates to my point in “Playing the Cards You’re Dealt” — students are looking for relevance, even if they themselves don’t know where their career will go or what they will be doing. The perception of relevance, the sense that it’s worth doing, is enough.

Female enrollment in the life sciences and geology remains robust; not so for physics and computer science. Herbers offers a telling anecdote.

One university wanted to interest girls in computer science. It sent out fliers to a local high school, inviting students to build computers on a Saturday morning. All boys showed up.

The university tried it again. This time it changed the wording to note the computers would be donated to inner-city schools. Girls showed up en mass.

Geology and life sciences tend to offer more tangible connections to solutions for real-world problems, Herbers says, which isn’t always articulated in the case of mechanical, electrical and computer sciences.

via Inventors Digest – The Invention Magazine for Idea People.

Operation Reboot in US News and World Report

How exciting!  Barb’s “Operation: Reboot” is in this week’s US News and World Report!

The high school instructor knows how to give a lecture, but isn’t very current about the latest technology in computer science. The IT professional is up-to-speed on computer science, but doesn’t know how to create a lesson plan, or handle an unruly teenager in the classroom. Together, however, they are learning from one another.

via Operation Reboot: IT Professionals Become Computer Science Teachers – US News and World Report.

Women in CS in Qatar: It’s Complicated

As mentioned, I’m at a meeting of the ACM Education Board at Qatar University in Doha.  We’re exploring the possibility of larger summits or even computing education conferences here in the Gulf States and in India.  We’re learning a lot about cultural differences and the challenge of even understanding the gender balance in computer science here.  I’m here with Dame Dr. Wendy Hall, President of the ACM, who keeps the gender issue front-and-center in discussions of computing education challenges in Qatar.  It’s complicated.

Members of Qatar University’s first ACM Student Chapter, and QU CS students with Dan Garcia and Wendy Hall

On the first day, we asked about the representation of women in computer science at Qatar University.  We were told that it was a real problem — CS is over 70% female and they’d like to attract more males. (Dan Garcia proposed starting an “ACM-M” chapter to attract more men.  We started considering an “NCMIT” and a wonderfully named “CRA-M” subcommittee.)

Why so few men?  The faculty told us (with some pain) that computer science is considered a lesser degree here.  The men want “engineer” in their degree, because the government says that engineers have to be paid more.  Some men who are interested in computer science go to school abroad, leaving the women who can’t really leave Qatar.  We were told that the faculty were considering adding more Information Systems classes to the Computer Science program, to make their students more marketable.  We were told (multiple times, in fact) that the computing culture in Qatar is more about adopting and adapting software for the Middle East culture and setting, with relatively little programming of new applications.  There’s a government push to innovate more in technology here, but it’s still mostly about modifying than creating.

Today, we heard from representatives from CMU’s Qatar campus.  Their gender split is 50/50!  They emphasize developing “a Geek culture,” because they claimed that sense of wanting to learn and digging in to figure it out yourself was missing from the student culture.  Wendy had some concerns with that.  ”Maybe you’re emphasizing the very thing that’s keeping the women away!”

Then as we talked more with the faculty, and in particular, with the almost-all female CS students of Qatar University who attended the sessions, we realized that the story was more complicated.  The female students avoided CMU Qatar.  They didn’t avoid CMU Qatar because of the “geek culture.”  If anything, I’d say that the QU CS students who spoke to us relished geek culture.  I was amazed at how eager they were to program “robots, animation, mobiles — anything! We want to be challenged!”  It turned out that some of the women had started exploring the programming competition problems available on the Web, all on their own. They don’t have any programming competitions here, but the y wanted more programming practice with more challenging problems. (How geeky is that!)  Dan Garcia of Berkeley asked them if they’d like more IT in their classes, and several students told him that they really preferred the straight CS, without dealing with management kinds of issues.  No, they avoided CMU Qatar because CMU Qatar does not segregate their classes by gender.

Qatar University has two campuses, one for men and one for women.  Men are never invited to the women’s campus.  The faculty advisor to the QU’s student chapter of the ACM, Ryan Riley, told me that women were sometimes invited to the men’s campus, but some women wouldn’t come.  He said that some of the “most covered” women (whose veils and garments only allowed their eyes to be visible) wouldn’t even come to the ACM event today because it was mixed gender.  The women who choose QU over CMU’s Qatar campus were explicitly choosing to be in an all-female culture — and as geeky as they could get it.

I’m left wondering how similar and how different this situation is from the one in the United States.  Yeah, there are a lot of women who are turned off by “Geek Culture,” but maybe there are also many, like the students here at QU, who embrace it.  Maybe other factors, like the gender segregation, come into play.  Certainly, factors like the prestige of the field and how well it pays, enter into the equation, and that differs radically in different cultural settings.  A focus on technology innovation vs. adaptation also plays a role in making a field attractive, and that differs between cultures, too.

I’m not a trained ethnographer, and I won’t claim that we have done anything like a “study” here.  But in two days of asking the same questions to faculty and students at different campuses, I do feel like we learned something important here — that it’s complicated.  Not that issues of gender balance in computing at home in the United States are easy! I expected the issues to be similar enough here in Qatar that I would have some insights into the issues.  Rather, I’m finding a greater appreciation for the interactions of many variables in these students’ decisions about computer science as a major and as a career.

Women graduate in STEM more than boys: It’s video games?

I found this report interesting, both because of its claim and because of the (what seems to me to be) horrendously flawed logic.  Women are increasingly taking more STEM classes, the author claims, and are nearly catching up to men.  However, more women graduate!  Why?  Well, of course, because men play more video games!  I might use this as an example of correlation-is-not-causation next time I teach the research methods section of my educational technology class.

The number of women taking courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM subjects, has been increasing since 1966 according to a new report. But another study, on boys’ academic responses to new video games, establishes a cause-and-effect relationship that could partly explain the decline in male academic achievement.

Women students in higher education now outnumber men in most countries, except Japan and Turkey. In the US, this has skewed the ratio among the sexes in terms of those who graduate: the proportion of males earning degrees has dropped to 43% while that for women has increased to 57%.

via University World News – US: Women gain in science while video games hold back boys.