Effective measures to foster girls’ interest in secondary computer science education

Abstract

The interest of girls in computing drops early during primary and secondary education, with minimal recovery in later education stages. In combination with the growing shortage of qualified computer science personnel, this is becoming a major issue, and also a target of numerous studies that examine measures, interventions, and strategies to boost girls’ commitment to computing. Yet, the results of existing studies are difficult to navigate, and hence are being very rarely employed in classrooms. In this paper, we summarize the existing body of knowledge on the effective interventions to recruit and retain girls in computer science education, intending to equip educators with a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate map of interventions recommended in the existing literature. To this end, we perform an aggregated umbrella literature review of 11 existing reviews on the topic, together accumulating joined knowledge from over 800 publications, and formulate the findings in a map of 22 concrete interventions structured in six groups according to their phase and purpose.

Modeling the impact of intrinsic coding interest on STEM career interest: evidence from senior high school students in two large Chinese cities

“…However, these antecedents have yet to be summarized systematically, and more review articles are needed. Third, prior research has pointed out differences between male and female students' STEM career interests (Happe et al, 2021). Also, children's coding experience may change their gender-based stereotypes or perceptions of STEM careers (Bati et al, 2021).…”

Smart rogaining for computer science orientation

“…• Gender-gap: A closely related challenge is finding strategies for the mitigation of gender gap, a problem for the vast majority of computer science degrees (Happe et al, 2021).…”

Barriers, Role Models, and Diversity – Women in IT

“…In order to find out what the latest research has revealed about what keeps women from the IT field, a dozen review papers, published in the past two years, were selected. [9,10,11,12,13,14] After examining these recent papers, each dedicated to review the latest literature about young women's barriers, we can differentiate four basic obstacles that account for girls' scarcity in IT: social, selfefficacy, educational, and labour market factors.…”

“…The most fundamental obstacle that girls face is gender stereotyping, that is, a binary world view that divides the social world into feminine vs. masculine domains and characteristics [15] connecting IT, and generally, STEM 1 to masculinity. [9,10,11,12,13,14] Gender-based social stereotypes can affect how young women's closest environment relates to their career interests, such as their families. It is especially fathers' and male siblings' attitudes that were shown to influence girls' choices.…”

“…As a direct consequence of gender stereotyping, girls tend to have low self-efficacy in STEM and specifically IT. [9,10,11,12,13,14] They perceive their analytical skills to be worse than they are and worse than boys'. It is also because of this that computer anxiety can develop in girls.…”