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Encouraging Women in CS 1: Interventional Inclusive Pedagogy in Computer Science

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

Topics in Computing and Information Technology-II

Tagged Division

Computing and Information Technology

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--30373

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/30373

Download Count

742

Paper Authors

biography

Arshia Khan University of Minnesota, Duluth

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Arshia A. Khan, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer-Engineering, M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D in Information Technology. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and span the biomedical informatics, clinical/health informatics, and consumer health informatics. Her research is on sensor based wireless, robotic non-intrusive device development for monitoring physiological changes for population health management, mobile clinical decision support, and data analysis. She authored “Objective-C and iOS Programming: A simplistic Approach"

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Abstract

The gender parity in the field of computer science (CS) is evident in education, workforce and research. This study, explores the introductory computer science class in an attempt to understand the low retention of women in CS. As means to encourage the retention of women in this class in the department of computer science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, two interventions were applied to address the issue of retention of women in CS . These interventions were based on the research findings where women are more inclined to solve real world problems that can benefit mankind and that women are dependent on social networking and more inclined to share their feelings with others when compared to men. The interventions were executed by offering a Facebook discussion group among consented students in the introductory courses in addition to replacing the traditional assignments with real-life problems in Fall 2015. The participants were surveyed to examine the effect of the two interventions. Our findings concluded that building the online discussion platform and using more practical problems can potentially help increase women’s interest in studying computer science. To track future research a feedback mechanism was developed that will aid in improving our approach.

Khan, A. (2018, June), Encouraging Women in CS 1: Interventional Inclusive Pedagogy in Computer Science Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--30373

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