The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) seeks to establish an extension service for nationwide, significant, and sustained increase in enrollment and graduation of women in undergraduate information technology bachelor's degree programs. The goal is to actively target an existing coalition of academic departments. This coalition, the NCWIT Academic Alliance, is eager to implement effective practices for increasing participation of women in their programs. A key process in the plan is to develop quickly many types of "exemplar institutions" that will serve as replicable role models of success. Processes and outcomes of these exemplars will be broadly disseminated, and support will be provided for change efforts, increasing the likelihood that other institutions can successfully emulate the effective processes. Exemplar institutions will serve as proof points to the entire nation and will become hubs for accelerated regional change.
A Bell Labs Fellow and a respected member of the computing research and information technology community of deans will lead the reform effort. Social scientists who are experts on issues of women in computing and program evaluation will implement, consult, collect and analyze data. A nationally recognized leader in assessing programmatic educational reform will conduct the external formative evaluation of the proposed extension service.
Our Unified Program of Change includes annual workshops for disseminating evidence-based effective practices and for supporting outreach, recruiting, and dissemination to regional communities. We will provide customized consultations with experts in implementation and industry members as well as small grants for research-related innovation and development by faculty. Evaluation is built into every aspect of the project to maximize positive outcomes for all stakeholders. Our model of active dissemination and implementation of known effective practices to a group committed to effecting real change will allow us to create exemplar institutions quickly. Such institutions can serve as proof points to the entire nation and will become hubs for accelerated regional change.
Intellectual Merit: This project is uniquely situated for success in increasing the participation of women in computing. The Academic Alliance is in place, growing, and eager to implement interventions. Each member is committed to implement only practices shown in research to increase recruitment and retention of women. Interventions will be closely evaluated through rigorous social science methods, led by expert social scientists. Each Academic Alliance member will be supported in collecting and analyzing its own data for ongoing formative evaluation, and will supply data to NCWIT for summative evaluation. The multi-pronged approach to each intervention will focus on changing the system, not just overcoming "deficiencies" among female students. Thus it requires fewer resources and will be sustained beyond the funding period.
Broad Impact: Increasing women's participation in IT has far-reaching national consequences. Not only do information and computing technologies pervade all aspects of our everyday lives in an unprecedented way, but all engineering and science discovery and innovation are now considered to be dependent on computational science. Increasing the pool of qualified computing professionals supports national goals: nanotechnology, the Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, and our economic, security, defense, and health care systems all depend on computing. Increasing the participation of women not only provides for national needs, but improves the development and design of computing systems, applications, and products through the integration of diverse ideas while helping overcome economic disparities for women.
The University of Virginia collaborated with University of Colorado Boulder to provide undergraduate computer science programs with information, materials, and consultants for research-based reform that increased women's representation. This project was a type of "Extension Service" that helped academic departments learn about and enact changes that research showed should improve the gender balance in their student enrollment and retention. Some features of the program were its focus on the entire system experienced by students - recruitment, pedagogy, curriculum, policies, peer and faculty support as well as continual improvement of this system through evaluation. Another important feature of the program was provision of highly trained consultants for tailored, personalized assistance and coaching as the client departments implemented recommended changes. This project demonstrated that with consultant support and continual encouragement, computer science departments improved their practices and enrolled higher proportions of women. Client departments improved more than other departments committed to gender equity, and more than the average U.S. undergraduate computer science department. Numerous resources, such as NCWIT Practice Sheets, Programs-in-a-Box, and surveys were created in the course of this project and are freely available from the NCWIT website, ncwit.org. Of particular note is a modularized survey for measuring undergraduate Students Experience of the Major (SEM). This tool makes it possible for departments to measure student perceptions that affect their commitment to their computing major, and thus make plans for correcting any problem areas that might exist.
