A data analytics certificate for non-computing majors.

This project aims to serve the national interest by creating and testing an innovative pathway for non-computing majors to stack micro credentials in technical skills, towards an academic certificate aligned to real-world career applications and providing students the skills needed for data-driven investigations in their respective disciplines. The resulting curriculum will feature a gentle introduction to programming using a no-code to low-code to high-code approach, to make it appealing to students from a broad-cross section of disciplines. The curriculum will be situated within the social justice context, making it appealing to historically marginalized communities in computing. This project will make data science more widely accessible, more relevant, and of greater interest to students in fields outside of Computer Science. The curriculum will be developed and tested within a rigorous research design which includes assessing the efficacy of the approach at raising awareness, access, and interest in data science. Research activities will inform the emerging data science for social justice certificate pathway within courses for non-computing majors, measure the efficacy of the certification innovation and its impacts on participants, and provide a means to produce fundamental, structural change in the computer science training landscape. The project team will assess (i) the utility and benefit of such a certification from practitioners’ perspectives using the Design Based Research approach (DBR), (ii) the efficacy of the approach in increasing the foundational knowledge of data science, shaping identities, perceptions, sense of abilities, and career choices of students, particularly from historically marginalized communities using the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) framework, and (iii) the ability of the proposed innovation to transform undergraduate computing education by identifying factors and supports that enable replication and sustainability using system mapping to study system-level change. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.