Fostering Culturally Relevant Programming Learning Experiences by Learnersourcing Contextualized Worked-Out Examples

This project aims to serve the national interest in enhancing the persistence of women in computing by fostering culturally relevant programming learning environments. In the last 20 years, the U.S. has seen a sharp decline in the number of women pursuing degrees in computing. This is a significant problem given the shortage of graduates qualified to pursue employment in computing. The project will identify how crowdsourcing-enabled pedagogy influences the engagement and learning outcomes of female students and will develop culturally relevant learning activities that can benefit all computing students. This project will provide early research exposure to female undergraduate students through participation in the research studies and co-authoring publications, which will, in turn, provide more exposure to young women's voices in the literature. The project has the potential to engage women as they are learning course material and building culturally relevant examples that could engage classmates. The methodology will incorporate feminist pedagogy and learner sourcing in the development of a workflow that will enable students to contextualize and create worked-out examples. The approach will be an empirical deployment of the workflow in the scope of three programming classes. This project will study the effectiveness of customized computing learning in minority-serving, culturally relevant, and domain-specific contexts and investigate conditions under which improved student learning occurs. Results will advance the understanding of how learner sourcing approaches can be effectively integrated in the classroom. The teaching practices will be disseminated with an open-source web application, workshops and outreach efforts, and the design and development of guidelines and tutorials. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.