Race Matters, but not Gender
March 12, 2010 at 7:29 pm 3 comments
Some new results point out that having black teachers has an important impact on getting black students to continue in science. What’s particularly interesting for me is that they did not find that gender of teachers had a particular impact on female students. This echoes a finding by Joanne Cohoon about computer science from several years ago, but I do keep hearing from teachers that having female teachers is critical for getting female students to succeed in computing. Joanne found that the gender of the teacher didn’t matter — it was encouragement that mattered, whether from a female or male teacher.
A new study points to another factor: the role of black college instructors in encouraging black science students to persist as science majors. The study finds a statistically significant relationship between black students who plan to be a science major having at least one black science instructor as freshmen and then sticking to their plans. The finding could be significant because many students (in particular members of under-represented minority groups) who start off as science majors fail to continue on that path — so a change in retention of science majors could have a major impact. At the same time, the study did not find a similar impact based on gender.
via News: Race Matters – Inside Higher Ed.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, broadening participation in computing.
Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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beki70 | March 12, 2010 at 7:39 pm
I’m trying to decide whether I agree with this… personally. My first Computer Science teacher was a woman, and we were the only two women in a class of 27. Then I had a male Computer Science teacher, for my A level, that was me and 6 other men. He was very supportive. I believe the female teacher was, class ratios worked somewhat against her! So I guess I don’t know. Not much help really am I 🙂
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White Boys are Boring: Demographic Impacts on Who We Teach « Computing Education Blog | March 20, 2010 at 12:09 pm
[…] changes are going to impact who we teach and how we teach over the next 25 years. We know that race matters when teaching, and that successful models teach differently for different cultural value […]
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The Role of Encouragement for Success in Computing Education, and how that differs by demographics | Computing Education Research Blog | March 2, 2018 at 7:00 am
[…] of developing the confidence to succeed in CS. We found this in our statewide study in 2010, and Joanne Cohoon found this to be critical in her work. In our work, we found that encouragement was more critical for under-represented group. The new […]