Welcome to the Course: Early Social Cues Influence Women's Persistence in Computer Science

Kizilcec, René F.; Saltarelli, Andrew J.; Bonfert-Taylor, Petra; Goudzwaard, Michael; Hamonic, Ella; Sharrock, Rémi

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376752

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Although the low barrier to entry for these free online courses has been expected to lower sociocultural hurdles to participation, we still find women to be underrepresented in STEM courses. Improving female enrollment in STEM courses has been the subject of some experimental research in online courses with mixed success [12,13,15,17]. In light of persistent stereotypes about STEM and identitybased motivations for course selection [33,49], our results suggest that how a course topic is labeled can have profound consequences for female enrollment.…”

Section: The Role Of the Course Subjectmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Much prior work has studied how manipulating a particular feature in an educational environment, such as classroom decorations [22], affects students' attitudes towards the environment. More recent work has extended this paradigm to investigate the behavioral consequences of specific course features in the field, such as how a diversity statement or social cues in course videos affect online course participation [13,15,17,48]. These research efforts have produced causal evidence that visual and verbal cues can influence student attitudes and behavior, but they have skipped over answering a broader research question with significant implications: how are commonly used features of course pages related to course participation patterns?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whether instructor gender influences either women's or men's or both their decisions to enroll warrants further examination. A study that manipulated the salience of instructor gender at the start of a STEM course found that women were exclusively impacted by the intervention [13], which suggests that a focus on female enrollment rates is warranted.…”

Section: The Role Of Instructor Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there is mounting evidence of online courses perpetuating historical participation and achievement gaps, including the underrepresentation of people with lower socioeconomic status and women in STEM disciplines [7][8][9][10][11]. Researchers have argued that the presence of visual and verbal cues in online environments can activate psychological stereotypes and reduce the sense of belonging in the learning environment for certain groups of students [12][13][14][15][16]. In particular, enrollment pages that provide descriptions and contextual information about courses are known to impact enrollment decisions [16,17] and students' eventual course grades [18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another study found a diversity statement on the enrollment page to raise enrollment among people with low educational attainment but not enrollment among women or people in developing countries [17]. Two more studies found the gender of people in lecture videos to influence women's engagement inside of the course [13,15]. These four studies offer causal evidence that certain visual and verbal cues can impact course participation for some sociodemographic groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying course characteristics associated with sociodemographic variation in enrollments across 159 online courses from 20 institutions

Kizilcec

Kambhampaty

2020

PLoS ONE

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Millions of people worldwide use online learning for post-secondary education and professional development, but participation from historically underrepresented groups remains low. Their choices to enroll in online courses can be influenced by course features that signal anticipated success and belonging, which motivates research to identify features associated with sociodemographic variation in enrollments. This pre-registered field study of 1.4 million enrollments in 159 online courses across 20 institutions identifies features that predict enrollment patterns in terms of age, gender, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status. Among forty visual and verbal features, course discipline, stated requirements, and presence of gender cues emerge as significant predictors of enrollment, while instructor skin color, linguistic style of course descriptions, prestige markers, and references to diversity do not predict who enrolls. This suggests strategic changes to how courses are presented to improve diversity and inclusion in online education.

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Section: The Role Of the Course Subjectmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Role Of Instructor Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Identifying course characteristics associated with sociodemographic variation in enrollments across 159 online courses from 20 institutions

Kizilcec

Kambhampaty

2020

PLoS ONE

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Relationship between Course-Level Social Belonging (Sense of Belonging and Belonging Uncertainty) and Academic Performance in General Chemistry 1

2021

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Students' social belonging in a general chemistry course has been shown to predict academic performance in that course. Additionally, students' social belonging at the beginning of a general chemistry course has been shown to differ across demographics, such as gender. This social belonging exists as both an absolute sense of belonging in the course and as an uncertainty in that belonging. Both social-belonging components are important for students' performance and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. In addition to differential social belonging across demographics at the beginning of the course, social belonging can change in response to course performance. This change in social belonging may further affect performance which may further affect social belonging in a recursive spiral. In this study, we investigated the recursive effect between course-level social belonging (measured as two separate, but correlated, components: sense of belonging and belonging uncertainty) and course performance in a general chemistry 1 course delivered in a hybrid online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found evidence that course-level social belonging and course performance interact with each other through a recursive mechanism during a semester of general chemistry 1. These findings highlight the importance of implementing inclusive interventions continuously throughout a general chemistry 1 course, particularly after key assessments, such as exams.

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The Effect of Social Belonging on Persistence to General Chemistry 2

Edwards,

Torres,

Frey

2023

J. Chem. Educ.

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Students’ social belonging in general chemistry has recently been shown to predict course performance, and their course-level social belonging has been shown to differ across demographics, such as gender. This course-level social belonging consists of two components: 1) sense-of-belonging, referring to a student’s feeling of social connectedness to peers, instructors, and course environment; and 2) belonging uncertainty, referring to a student’s perception of the stability of one’s belonging or perceived ability relative to their peers in the class. In this study, we examined the belonging uncertainty as a novel factor that influences students’ persistence from General Chemistry 1 (GC1) to General Chemistry 2 (GC2). This study took place during the COVID-19 pandemic; hence, GC1 and GC2 were delivered remotely (containing synchronous and asynchronous components). Our results show evidence for 1) GC1 performance alone did not entirely explain students’ persistence to GC2 for students whose majors required GC2 (i.e., some students receiving an A and approximately half of the students with a C/C+ in GC1 did not continue to GC2), and late-semester GC1 belonging uncertainty predicts persistence for some women; 2) women reported having a higher belonging uncertainty than men at the beginning of GC2, despite there being no differences in final GC1 course grade across gender; and 3) for all students, the final GC1 course grade did not predict early semester GC2 belonging, even though the structures of the two courses were very similar. These findings add to the literature highlighting the importance of implementing inclusive practices throughout GC1 and GC2.

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Welcome to the Course: Early Social Cues Influence Women's Persistence in Computer Science

Cited by 10 publications

References 46 publications

Identifying course characteristics associated with sociodemographic variation in enrollments across 159 online courses from 20 institutions

Identifying course characteristics associated with sociodemographic variation in enrollments across 159 online courses from 20 institutions

Relationship between Course-Level Social Belonging (Sense of Belonging and Belonging Uncertainty) and Academic Performance in General Chemistry 1

The Effect of Social Belonging on Persistence to General Chemistry 2

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