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The Proof of Gold is Fire: Measuring Stress to Show Impact of Gender Based Initiatives in Computing Education

Published: 11 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Many initiatives across the world try to address the issue of gender imbalance in computing education. Evaluation of the impact of these initiatives is not always straightforward. Some interventions are able to demonstrate impact based on recruitment and retention numbers of underrepresented gender groups, in particular, women, often requiring a longer-term study to see impact. Others, especially shorter term interventions and those taking place during the teaching and learning process, frequently use feedback and other instruments as a measure of impact. This work reviews existing evaluation methods from the literature, categorises them as using statistical data, feedback or instruments, grouping different approaches into sub categories. It then looks at how the different types of initiatives map to the categories of evaluation practices, discusses trends, and makes a recommendation suitable for measuring the impact on shorter term than obtaining recruitment or retention statistics. The Perceived Stress Scale is proposed as a lightweight and time saving approach to evaluate some of the retention based gender initiatives.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGITE '23: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
      October 2023
      230 pages
      ISBN:9798400701306
      DOI:10.1145/3585059
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Published: 11 October 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. Computing Education
      2. Evaluation
      3. Gender
      4. Impact
      5. Women

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      • Huawei Ireland
      • Higher Education Authority Ireland

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