NSF Award
1757402
There is a critical need to increase the number of skilled technology workers within the United States, with computing skills becoming increasingly important as the nation moves further into the 21st century. This need is fueled by the realization that the number of tech workers needed to maintain political and economic security far outweighs the current workers available now or in the immediate future. To increase interest, commercial, governmental, and not-for-profit educational groups have sponsored numerous initiatives aimed to bring computing to more students, recently with a K-12 emphasis. This project seeks to determine the long-term impact of these activities as a mechanism for growing the skilled technology workforce within the United States. <br/> <br/>The goal of this project is to create the resources and tools necessary for identifying best practices for identifying the long term impact of these pre-college computing activities on participants, including analyses of data based on gender and ethnicity. The project's scope will include two phases: 1) the identification, review, and analysis of past and current pre-college computing activities and their impact on participants to determine the major influencing variables and 2) the creation and implementation of a formal process for collecting data related to pre-college computing activities, including major influencing variables, necessary for educational researchers to be able to evaluate and analyze the long-term impact of these activities. Two significant outputs from this project are the creation of instruments available for measuring the long-term effects of pre-college computing efforts; and measurement results from using these instruments to evaluate the effects of current and past pre-college computing efforts.
